ART-PRESENTATION: List Projects-Farah Al Qasimi
Working in photography, video, and performance, Farah Al Qasimi examines postcolonial structures of power, gender and taste in the Gulf Arab states. She studied photography and music at Yale University in 2012 and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2017. Her practice over the years has moved fluidly between private and public spaces, but the content has primarily remained focused on locating the fantastic in the everyday. She also explores how consumer culture seduces people, particularly women, with promises of beauty or self-improvement.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photos: MIT List Visual Arts Center
The exhibition “List Projects: Farah Al Qasimi”, at MIT List Visual Arts Center is the artist’s first solo exhibition at a US institution. Alongside a group of recent photographs, the exhibition premieres “Um Al Naar” (Mother of Fire) (2019), a forty-minute video structured as a television documentary following a jinn*, or ghost-like spiritual entity. Delivering a confessional, reality TV-style monologue, the jinn appears on camera beneath a patterned sheet. At once playful and melancholic, the video interweaves her ruminations on centuries of Portuguese and British colonial meddling in what is now the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, the reverberating influence of European encroachment on the region, and the adoption of euro-centric museological practices for the display of historical artefacts. Imbuing her sumptuous visuals with a near-editorial sensibility, Al Qasimi’s still and moving images facilitate a range of subtle interventions that manipulate codified expectations of how images are constructed and understood between Euro-American and Middle Eastern cultural contexts. Camouflage and concealment play a central role in Al Qasimi’s work. She employs these strategically to level covert critiques of the gender divide in the Gulf States, examining its colonial and religious origins. In her frequent juxtapositions of hybrid cultural objects and sites, the artist’s images explore symbolic capital, and confront national identity in its relationship to consumerism and taste. As she embeds her work with double meanings. In a recent series of portraits that include “Living Room Vape” (2017) and “A’s Reflection” (2019), Al Qasimi obscures the faces of her subjects while capturing moments that feel intimate despite their staging. Various compositional strategies hide identifying features, behind plumes of smoke, sumptuously patterned textiles and drapery, or through the spectral image of a face reflected in glass, while accentuating the opulently decorated interiors her sitters inhabit. With her interest in artifice and the public presentation of taste, Al Qasimi’s images of shopping arcades, domestic settings, or non-human subjects like dyed pastel birds and falcons, also speak to cultural constructions of identity, gender, and the ascription of value to consumer goods. As she embeds her work with double meanings, Al Qasimi’s still and moving images are as seductive and visually lush as they are incisive in their criticality.
*Jinn (genies) are supernatural creatures in early pre-Islamic Arabian and later Islamic mythology and theology. Since jinn are neither innately evil nor innately good, Islam was able to adapt spirits from other religions during its expansion.
Info: Curator: Henriette Huldisch, MIT List Visual Arts Center , 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, MA, Duration: 30/7-20/10/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, https://listart.mit.edu
