Farah Al Qasimi | The Swarm

×

Expand

Farah Al Qasimi, “Selfie with a Toy Gun,” 2021

27" x 35" (courtesy of the gallery)

Opening reception | Friday, September 29, 2023 | 7 – 10 pm

Photography work predominates Farah Al Qasimi’s practice, and it is fundamentally documentarian. Qasimi is an Emirati born in Abu Dabi and splits her time between there and New York City. These places principally inform and are the focus of her photographs. More extendedly, her work comes to include Persian Gulf states and its diaspora in the West. Qasimi’s images often feature domestic interiors, seemingly innocuous objects or still lives. Glimpses of these along with a new video essay, can be seen superimposed against one of her signature wallpaper installations in her solo exhibition, The Swarm. Although her photographs are rooted in a documentary practice in a broad sense, through her camera, the resultant images appear almost cinematic, teeming with effervescent colours and details.

The Gulf region, although still relatively emerging, is a post-industrial society. The United Arab Emirates was only established in the 70s after years of British colonial rule. The region’s acceleration in growth is, in part, a reaction to transcend its colonial past (and a post-911 symbolic subjugation) and into a longedfor future filled with limitless wealth. A significant part of this reaction is steeped in image, affect, and self-presentation. Qasimi’s work speaks to the hyper-affect and exuberance in these dreams of transcendence. If her photographs feel like a dramatized and ornately crafted inverted version of reality, they are a reflection of the everyday spaces and surfaces she frequents. And, by extension, a reflection of the people and communities’ heightened sense of ornamentation, their social stratification, and their commodified fantasies. The notion of paradise–a common motif in Islam and popular culture in the Gulf – an oasis from a present condition is a prevailing interest in Qasimi’s work, and in this exhibition, we see semblances of this through her wallpaper. We are confronted in her image of “paradise” or, rather, a found one secondhandily depicted here with the limits of the depiction made visible. It is an image of an empty field of tulips. Generic in quality like a travel postcard image. The colours are visibly saturated, although Qasimi’s re-presentation is feigned by the graininess of the camera, the veritable seam of the wallpaper, and the wall behind this patchy image of paradise. Qasimi extends this facile rendering of an oasis through her video essay, The Swarm, which features one of her puppet-like characters' as they are transported into an undersea world by way of a fictional pharmaceutical called Compzure. Qasimi’s work here explores the hunger for fantasy-making, and although there’s an awareness of it as the grand prize of capitalism, the transfixing allure to surrender into it is just as palpable. The artist is every bit as critical of this and isn’t distanced from it.