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FARAh al qasimi
About the Artist
Farah Al Qasimi (b. 1991, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) is a photographer who lives and works between New York and Dubai. She studied photography and music at Yale University in 2012 and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2017. Al Qasimi has also been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, including the Capricious Book Award (2021); the NADA Artadia Award, New York (2018); the Ward Cheney Award for Performance and Composition, Yale School of Art (2017); and the Creative and Performing Arts Award, Yale University (2010).
Her photographs aim to unpack and examine the layered aspects of each place the artist finds herself in and are thus imbued with a mode of observation and social critique. Through photography, video and performance, she engages in a dialogue about the unspoken social norms, boundaries and values embedded in contemporary society.
Al Qasimi’s work often steps outside the boundaries of a 4 x 4 photographic print. Back and Forth Disco (2020), for example, presented seventeen newly commissioned photographs in one hundred bus shelters across New York.
The artist is steadfast in her passion to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, displaying the everyday lives of her subjects to countless New York City commuters. She finds inspiration in salons and malls, combining the aesthetic features she observes in Dubai and New York: the two cities that have shaped her personal experiences through their different cultures.
These urban spaces, once commercialised and overwhelming, become saturated, colourful and fantastical testaments to the beauty that can be found on one’s own doorstep.
Farah Al Qasimi by Matthew Leifheit
Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai
WORKS IN THE COLLECTION
Farah Al Qasimi, "S Eating Watermelon", 2015
Archival inkjet print, 152 × 114.3 cm
Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai
S Eating Watermelon (2015) is part of a series titled Arrival and shown at Photoworks Festival in 2020. In this series, Al Qasimi explores the UAE’s colonial past through the history and development of photography in the Gulf region. The work highlights the events, both large and small, which occur in the places she chooses to work. Here, the viewer is presented with a scene in which a mundane action becomes a piece of theatre. The artist’s particular talent lies in the creation of the scene: although it shows a completely real, even intimate moment, the impression nonetheless is that a performance is taking place.
Farah Al Qasimi, "Winter Fog", 2016
Archival inkjet print, 11.43 x 152.4 cm
Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai
Winter Fog (2016), also part of the Arrival series, highlights Al Qasimi’s interest in the otherworldly and the ethereal. The viewer is invited to enter a landscape obscured by a natural force. Al Qasimi’s refusal to digitally alter her pieces only serves to augment the beauty in the ominous. The landscape appears subsumed by a single, powerful entity that expands beyond the frame. The indistinctness of the space gives the viewer the task of deciphering it and exploring the infinite possibilities of what could occur in there.