Art

Farah Al Qasimi examines the use of photography for the purposes of shaping perception and delineating identity, with a focus on men in her respective communities in the United Arab Emirates and the United States. An image’s impressions of power and threat are culturally produced, with its visual codes cueing the viewer’s interpretation. Al Qasimi’s images subvert these assumptions with humor and sympathy, disrupting the signaling that triggers categorization. Al Qasimi also includes the equipment and repositories of aesthetic identification, ranging from familial categorization in an album to data collection in a government archive and media depictions of Arab and Southeast Asian men ubiquitous in a post-9/11 cultural landscape. Al Qasimi draws a parallel from these contemporary nodes of aesthetic judgment to classical portraiture, taking cues from Holbein and Dutch Golden Age painting. In several lush portraits, acculturated notions of majesty serve to dignify her subjects. Her play with the legibility of images and the perception of threat is most pronounced in a portrait rendered only as shadow. In Gurdwara Nanak Darbar Sahib (Kansas), 2017, a turbaned man standing at a lectern appears primarily as a shadow cast on the wall, while the podium and two pink roses in front of him are dramatically spotlighted. Al Qasimi took this photograph at a Sikh temple in Olathe, Kansas; she had traveled there as a photojournalist to cover the aftermath of a hate crime in which, the month following Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, one Indian American man was fatally shot and another injured in a bar by a man who mistook them for Arabs. The mournful picture implies that in the eyes of the Olathe killer, all foreign bodies are interchangeable and expendable. Farah Al Qasimi (b. Abu Dhabi, 1991) is an artist working in photography, video, sound and performance. Farah received an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 2017, and recently completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Selected exhibitions include No to the Invasion: Breakdowns and Side Effects at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard (Annondale-on-Hudson, NY), Doublespeak at Shulamit Nazarian (Los Angeles), A Scream Runs Through The House at Helena Anrather (New York), and Coming Up Roses at The Third Line (Dubai).