DUBAI.- The Third Line presents The Lost Empire, Fouad Elkoury’s third solo show in Dubai, which presents the artist’s photographic journey through abandoned soviet military bases.

In a practice spanning more than four decades, Fouad’s work has come to be associated with documentary photography through lands that have experienced strife – with the landscape and architecture pockmarked with human conflict. The current body of work explores a similar topography of war.

After having decided to document abandoned soviet military bases in 2009, Fouad visited dozens of military bases in Poland, Hungary, Estonia and East Germany between 2010 and 2011. Most were aviation fields; others served separate purposes. And despite having being told there was nothing to photograph there, Fouad found the abandoned desolation far more captivating.

Deserted and invaded by nature, a force far more primal and stronger than weapons of war, the bases have become unserviceable areas of land. The utter silence and emptiness left Fouad the only protagonist in the plot, searching for abandoned stories, and his only ally was light, without which nothing could be seen.

Fouad Elkoury has been at the forefront of photographic practices in Lebanon and the wider Middle East for quite some time. In 1982, he covered the Israeli invasion of Beirut and in 1984 published Beyrouth Aller-Retour, a book documenting the bomb-shocked city - a prelude to his sophomore project Beirut City Centre in 1991, and ignited a distinguished bibliography which continues to this day.

Fouad created the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation in 1997, and in 2001 introduced video into his repertoire with the film Lettres à Francine to accompany the chiaroscuro-esque photographic series Sombre, with Moving Out (2003) and Welcome to Beirut (2005) to follow. His On Love and War, a series of journal entries spanning the duration of Israel’s onslaught onto Lebanon in august 2006 was shown in Lebanon’s first National Pavilion in the Venice Biennale of 2007.

Fouad has held solo exhibitions at major institutions including Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, Paris; Beirut Art Center, Beirut; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; and 9th Gwangju, 52nd Venice and 7th Sharjah Biennials. Fouad's works are part of permanent collections as Centre Pompidou in Paris, Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and Solidere in Beirut.