A quarter of the space is taken up with architectural models of Abu Dhabi’s planned new cultural district, Saadiyat Island (Island of Happiness), which are bitterly disappointing responses to the exhibition’s call for “new forms” to be invented for the UAE’s cultural institutions. Instead, we get an elaboration on existing Western models: Frank Gehry gets to build a Guggenheim even wilder than Bilbao, Jean Nouvel has designed an exquisite Middle East outpost for the Louvre, and Zaha Hadid plans a gargantuan performing-arts center that looks like a sleek digital amphibian slithering out of the sea. Not to be outdone, Dubai, too, is planning a “Culture Village,” and UNStudio has designed a Museum of Middle Eastern Modern Art that is so similar to Hadid’s building that you think it must be a deliberate attempt to demystify her virtuosity through repetition.

In contrast to the grandiosity of the Abu Dhabi “platform,” with its big-gun foreign curator, huge space, and aesthetic purity, the emphasis in the UAE pavilion, titled “It's Not You, It's Me,” is on the bottom-up pooling of knowledge and the cultivation of arts infrastructure: Computer stations let you surf the nascent online UAE Art Archive, which showcases the work of national artists, and there’s a video kiosk featuring conversations between cultural policymakers in the UAE.

But the main component of the pavilion is a selection of photographs by the 26-year-old Lamya Gargash. There are maybe a maximum of three types of living situations that we can easily imagine in Dubai through standard media coverage (Simon Jenkins and Germaine Greer in particular are guilty of shockingly lazy stereotypes): the decadent five- (or seven-) star hotel, the ex-pat gated community/compound on an artificial island, and the Dickensian laborers’ camp. Gargash undermines this list with a type of accommodation that doesn’t come so easily to mind: the humble one-star hotel.

Gargash photographs people-less hotel rooms (though she occasionally inserts framed photos of family members), lobbies, and corridors head-on and unemotionally with a medium-format camera, creating a systematic analysis of what usually gets summarily repressed in the official narrative of Dubai, city of wonders: the generic and the banal. We see beds with gaudy purple comforters and white sheets folded crisp and tight and awaiting your arrival, clean tiled floors, tissue dispensers and cushions just so, elaborately folded towels, air-conditioning units, flowers — nothing fancy, but everything pristine.

Her transient hotel rooms might be an update on Bedouin tents as a mode of living. They also reveal the aesthetics of the UAE’s small and hidden lower/middle class, from which an embedded civic society — rather than a get-rich-quick expat commercial zone — will grow. Gargash is a worthy “representative” of her nation, pointing out an optimistic, necessary, and largely ignored “future of culture” in the UAE.