This exhibition presents works spanning the last four years by New York- and Dubai-based artist Farah Al Qasimi. Moving from the intimacy of domestic interiors to lively, colourful public spaces of leisure and consumption, the photographs on display present a personal, fractured and hallucinatory portrait of life in the UAE. Interested in the cultural conditioning that determines the way we come to read signs and signifiers in photographic images, Al Qasimi’s practice is an attempt to disrupt the easy reading of images, particularly those on or about Dubai and the wider UAE.

Drawn largely from the Art Jameel Collection, Artist’s Rooms is a series of solo exhibitions by influential, innovative artists, with particular focus on practitioners from the Middle East, Asia and Africa. These capsule shows are collaborative and curated in dialogue with the artist. Spring 2019 features rooms by Seher Shah and Randhir Singh, Hemali Bhuta, Farah Al Qasimi and Chiharu Shiota in galleries 1, 2, 3 and 10.

Farah Al Qasimi (b.1991) lives and works between New York, USA and Dubai UAE

Farah is an artist working with photography, video and performance. 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.

Al Qasimi’s work has been shown in Conversation 7 (with Marcela Pardo Ariza) at the San Francisco Arts Commission (2018);  Alserkal Avenue, Dubai as part of UAE unlimited (2018); Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi (2018 & 2015); CCS Bard Galleries, New York (2017); The Third Line, Dubai (2016 & 2014); the Biennial for Arab Photography, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2015); and the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah (2016). She has participated in residencies at the Delfina Foundation, London (2017); the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison (2017); and was awarded the New York NADA Artadia Prize (2018) and the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship(2018). She has also participated in the Sheikha Salama Foundation and Rhode Island School of Design Emerging Artist Fellowship (2014).