Writing in 2020, artist and writer Christopher Joshua Benton described Farah Al Qasimi's 'brand of Gulf Futurism' as 'less ironic than her contemporaries, but probably more complex—offering up a sentimental, nostalgic, and critical window that is world-building'.
Coined by artists Sophia Al-Maria and Fatima Al Qadiri about a decade ago, Gulf Futurism, broadly speaking, describes the cultural shifts prompted by the rapid modernisation of the Gulf states into what Al Qadiri described as a 'consumer-culture robot desert'. Al Qasimi's images, a patchwork of forms and intersecting perspectives, both encapsulate and expand this contextual milieu in the U.A.E., where tradition has become enmeshed with mall culture, technological development, and free-market globalism.
Dragon Mart LED Display (2019), for instance, is a maximalist still life in which an entanglement of L.E.D. light tubes and plastic flowers in shiny white vases glitter amid a backdrop of mirrored surfaces, reflective walls, and fairy light cascades. The work extends from 'DRAGON!', a series commissioned for the Global Art Forum in 2017, which focuses on Dubai's Dragon Mart, among the largest hubs for Chinese products outside China.
'There are so many layers of aesthetic translation happening there,' Al Qasimi has said of the mall, with its Chinese-produced Gulf furniture adapting classically European styles. 'So there's a sort of broken-telephone game of cultural interpretation happening.'
Dragon Mart LED Display appears in General Behaviour, a survey of Al Qasimi's photographs and videos from 2012 to 2021 at the Cultural Foundation in Abu Dhabi (11 March–20 September 2022), alongside 'Closed Kiosk' (2019), a minimalist series zooming in on monochrome fabrics used by Dragon Mart vendors to cover their booths.
General Behaviour unfolds the broken-telephone game of translation that Al Qasimi describes across images that treat landscape, portraiture, and still-life pictorial traditions with a 21st-century perspective. Whether in Old McDonald's (2014), the imprint of an absent McDonald's 'M' on a sand-brick wall; or M Napping On Carpet (2016), the bird's-eye view of a woman in a beige floral tunic lying on a beige floral carpet in shiny, hot-pink-to-burning-blue heels.
Across Al Qasimi's exhibitions, images blown up into wallpapers form backdrops for photographs arranged like notes in a graphic score—a compositional device echoing Aviary (2019), a photograph of a woman viewing a faux indoor desert complete with live birds and wallpaper sand dunes.
There's a claustrophobia to these compositions, in which artifice and reality are crammed into sharply lit and hyper-colourised frames. And yet, Al Qasimi choreographs these densities into formal explosions that paradoxically create room for images to breathe.
Take Living Room Vape (2016). A clash of interior details frames a man in a white kandura sitting on an embossed periwinkle sofa, with a European painting of a stone-arch bridge framed in gilded gold behind him.
The room's blue walls are mostly concealed by such adornments, including a woven wall tapestry with red velvet borders. A Persian carpet covers the floor, and a table hosts a circle of vases, one bursting with a multi-coloured bouquet: every pattern reflects the Silk Road's transcultural legacies. To one side, a woman reaches out a hand as her metallic, purple-blue robe expands. Amid the detail, the man's face, the image's focal point, is obscured by a perfect plume of vape smoke.
Witty sleights of hand like these define Al Qasimi's compositions, as seen in Shower with Lux Soap (2018), where a hand emerges from the top of a white shower curtain wielding a bar of pink soap, like a soft invocation of Hitchcock's infamous Psycho shower scene.
Lux soap reappears in Lux Soap in Blue Bathroom (2018), a close-up of a blue ceramic sink with pink soap nestled in its corner groove. In General Behaviour, the image is shown with Orange Soap in Orange Bathroom (2018), which catches peach soap melting into a niche—part of a series elevating both the still life and monochrome traditions to a sublime and nostalgic domestic kitsch.
Also on view is Perfume (Obama, Lovable, Flawless) (2018), a still life of perfume bottles arranged on a green-marbled bathroom ledge, like a technicolour Morandi. The work connects to Dream Soup (2019), a video tracking the production of perfumes in factories and stores around the Emirates, screened in a room with lavender Rococo furniture and carpeting.
'I've been trying to nail down what a "Gulf aesthetic" actually is, and I don't think you can,' Al Qasimi said in one interview, pointing out that looking at the displays at Dragon Mart is part of it—'I always go there when I want to think about where I am.'
The same could be said of Al Qasimi's practice in general, where the subject of the Gulf expands into a dynamic, maximalist, rhizomatic entanglement that cannot be contained, much like the artist's practice.
In this interview, Al Qasimi reflects on the personal significance of General Behaviour, while introducing Surge, a recent solo show at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles (14 May–18 June 2022), which marked the opening of a horizon in the artist's practice.
From the Ocula website.
