An overview of photo and video works by Farah Al Qasimi between 2017 and 2021, with which the artist investigates how spaces and subjectivities inflect and influence each other.
Titled after Farah Al Qasimi's photograph Star Machine (2021)—a self-portrait in which the artist uses the star machine to transcend the monotony of her surroundings after two weeks of quarantine—this publication accompany the eponymous exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation and presents a selection of images from across existing and new bodies of work, wrapping them in found images from Alibaba merchants, that speak to our shared aspirations for transcendence beyond our daily lives. Understanding the camera as a relational tool, Al Qasimi's hyper-colourised and richly textured photographs and films focus our attention upon how we see, feel and initiate contact with people, places, or ways of being within today's world.
Farah Al Qasimi (born 1991 in Abu Dhabi, lives and works between Dubai and Brooklyn) is a photographer, video and performance artist who presents her work in vibrant and detailed installations. Employing photography as a tool of intimate inquiry into how spaces and subjectivities inflect each other, Al Qasimi's hyper-colourised photographs frame the mundane with explosive beauty, humorous indifference and transgressive social commentary. In doing so, she practices with an understanding of social media's conflation with youth culture and its re-purposing, by artists and individuals alike, as a tool for complicating the medium of photography, its relationship to self-creation, and the consequences of our present socio-technological condition on the re-configuration of the public and private sphere.
