The publication Farah Al Qasimi: Star Machine is available for purchase via the AGWA Design Store
Farah Al Qasimi is a photographer, video and performance artist who presents her work in vibrant and detailed installations. The Art Gallery of Western Australia presented the artist’s first solo exhibition in Australia, Star Machine which featured photography and video from 2017 to 2021. Based between Brooklyn and Abu Dhabi, Al Qasimi employs photography as a tool of intimate inquiry into how spaces and subjectivities inflect and influence each other. Her hyper-colourised photographs frame the mundane with explosive beauty, humorous indifference and transgressive social commentary. This unique approach to image-making is both critical and reparative. The works in Star Machine flicker between darker moments of isolation and disconnection, and idyllic expressions of care, community and faith. Between these poles, Al Qasimi maps the traces of affect that simultaneously hold and punctuate our daily lives.
The following conversation between Farah Al Qasimi and curator Rachel Ciesla took place over WhatsApp and email. Its casual tone echoes the intimacy of Al Qasimi’s work as they swap thoughts on their experience of the pandemic, our shared aspirations for transcendence beyond our daily lives, and how we use photography, an inherently social medium, to seek out sensations of closeness when we are physically separated from someone.
RACHEL CIESLA
It’s my 33rd birthday next week and I’ve honestly been feeling rather anxious about it. Perhaps I am living in the wrong place? I didn’t expect to be back in my hometown [Perth] for so long. Close to my family but away from so many loved ones. And so, when I see your work in the Gallery and I start speaking to people, so many of them say how transformative and transcendent your photographs feel to them. They’re reminded of people and places they know and cherish, or of places they would like to know, or people they want to be which is something that Murtaza Vali also identified when speaking about your work in this book. He used the keyword RADIANT and spoke of caged birds ‘[dissolving] into a blaze of white light as if captured in the midst of rapture or teleportation’ or the ‘simulated sparkle’ of Star Machine which distils all the magic and melancholy that I have felt these past few years into one image. It could make me feel incredibly depressed, but I do believe that images are coping strategies. I swap them with my friends every day because it makes me feel closer to them, and so I do absolutely believe Murtaza when he says that the luminosity of your photographs ‘is that of infinite possibility, of transformation into anything and everything else.’
FARAH AL QASIMI
That’s so beautiful! And echoes much of what I’ve been feeling lately. The forced compression of isolation is still in a long process of undoing, and I think many of us, in that flattening of our lives, became more aware of the holes. I have always felt torn between two places, suspended on a cartoon globe with my limbs anchored in different places. This has only intensified recently; when I’m here, I think of home [the Emirates] with its pink flamingos, overripe sunsets and air conditioned malls, and when I’m there, I think of New York, and its ice cream truck jingles and subway performers, of watching my dog chase squirrels up the elm trees in the park. I think my work tries to see the idealised version of everything, of recognising the human impulse to edit, to sentimentalise. It’s a coping mechanism.
RACHEL CIESLA
That’s all very true. Becoming more aware of the holes. Do you think it’s ok to look back at the past or a place with rose coloured glasses? It makes me feel a little guilty. Or perhaps I rephrase, is it ok to be so localised and internal? To be focused on such small mundane details amidst all that was swirling around us at that time and is continuing to do so in many ways.
FARAH AL QASIMI
It’s inevitable. To have selective amnesia – to remember only that which serves us. To categorise things as “good” or “bad” – what’s worthy of nostalgia and what isn’t.
RACHEL CIESLA
Reflection seems to be an important element within your photographs?
FARAH AL QASIMI
Yes – I think part of being alive now is to have yourself reflected back at you with a vengeance. Everything has a digital footprint, photographs have a longevity that they’ve never had before – we look at ourselves to try and understand how others see us, not in a photograph, not in a fixed image, but moving, fluid, breathing – the reflection of a person, for me, allows them space to be more elusive and watery, and acknowledges their own relationships with looking at themselves.
RACHEL CIESLA
You have previously said that you want the colours in your photographs to be as bright as possible. Did the pandemic shift how you see the world tonally?
FARAH AL QASIMI
I think my understanding of luminosity and its extremes has shifted. The work I’ve made since then is subtler, more quiet. Finding concentrated moments of colour in an otherwise muted landscape. The world has changed, and so have I, so it makes sense that the photographs would be different, too.
RACHEL CIESLA
And what about ghosts? Woman in Window and Woman in Swimming Pool [2023] feel like they’ve been lifted straight from a horror film.
FARAH AL QASIMI
To try to engage with human connection, transcendence, and beauty – there has to be entrapment, solitude, and disappearance too.
RACHEL CIESLA
It’s really difficult to sit with both the internal and the infinite. But for me such tensions do reveal themselves in your work. I have always felt that your photographs prompt a new reading of the female subject and her position in society. Your images of women are so carefully crafted. They are fully aware of how their appearance is being scrutinised and so there is a calculated awareness to how they and you are employing female beauty culture and social media’s culture of aspirational living. Images that perform emotionality and narcissism online in order to complicate our performance of the self and its desires. Similarly, your images of the marketplace: be it mirrored shopping malls, fluorescent bootleg garment stores, green-tinged bridal shops, and of course Ali Baba, are transcendent spaces filled with pleasure and promise. Which also reminds me of Barbara Kruger’s “I shop therefore I am” and its pointed critique of materialism and consumerism. Of relevance to that time and still relevant now, but I feel that your images offer a way through that is more compassionate.
FARAH AL QASIMI
I’m criticising myself in this work, because I’m a sucker for the whole cycle of promise and reward. Buy new thing, embody characteristic that new thing represents to you. Become the kind of person who has ALWAYS had new thing. The old you is erased. Of course, it never works that way, but the constant drive towards implosion and rebirth is something I am always contending with.
RACHEL CIESLA
All of which, and more, is so eloquently mapped out by Murtaza in nine keywords: GHOST, FLORID, ORNAMENTALISM, RADIANT, SURFACISM, TACKY, VEIL, and WALLPAPER
But as he said ‘there could, of course, be countless others.’
