Dubai zoo in the upmarket Jumeirah district of the city was finally closed in 2015 after many years of serving the function of a repository for outgrown and unwanted exotic pets. According to news reports the animals were moved to the new, state-of-the-art Dubai Safari park which was built on the construction-waste landfill site that I photographed in 2012. You can see this photograph in my ‘consumption’ series.

As I once pointed out in a blog post for the website Green Prophet, it’s interesting that concrete aggregates mined from the Hajar Mountains in the East of the country and used in the city’s construction industry, have been subsequently re-used to create this new mountain on the Hatar Road which the safari park was built on. The Hajar Mountains themselves have a rich and distinct ecosystem that is steadily being destroyed by the open-cast aggregate mining industry. Unique mountain species, like the Arabian Tahr, Arabian Leopard, Arabian Wolf and Caracal are all either extinct, or nearing extinction in the UAE.

This series was included in my solo exhibition The Anthropocene at GPP in 2016.