Farah Al Qasimi: Toy World

27th February - 19th April 2024
  • Farah Al Qasimi

     

    Toy world

  • The Third Line is pleased to announce Toy World, our fourth solo exhibition with Farah Al Qasimi. The exhibition debuts a collection of still and moving images in black and white and color.

  • Toy World

    Sarah Chekfa
  • If I go to Google and ask it to define “actor,” I am greeted with the following secondary definition: “a...
    Farah Al Qasimi, Dune, n.d., Archival Inkjet Print, 50.8 x 68.58 cm, Edition of 5, 2AP

    If I go to Google and ask it to define “actor,” I am greeted with the following secondary definition: “a person who behaves in a way that is not genuine.” The example sentence illustrating this definition: “in war one must be a good actor.” Ipso facto: IN WAR ONE MUST BEHAVE IN A WAY THAT IS NOT GENUINE. They say we live in a post-truth era, but this reads like a Jenny Holzer Truism.  

     

    Actors in the theater of war go the way of images. An image can never be genuine. By default, it frames, excludes, contorts, seeks to represent: it must be ideological. Our relationship with images is reflexive: as images represent ideology, so our ideology is formed through images. An image begs to be interpreted. So a photo shorn of context is like a rose with no petals, only thorns. The rise of artificial intelligence portends that we must also contend with fake images. These are fake roses with real thorns and no petals.

  • Farah’s images are both real: organically taken in-the-world — and “fake”: staged, in her studio or elsewhere. Yet herimages, both...

    Farah Al Qasimi, Tumbling Woman, 2024, Video Installation, 1m30s, Edition 1 of 3, 1AP

    Farah’s images are both real: organically taken in-the-world — and “fake”: staged, in her studio or elsewhere. Yet herimages, both real and “fake,” are all petals and no thorns. The unreality of contemporary life is inaugurated to the echelon of art object. In looking at these photographs, we role-play the time we spend looking at images online, unable to discern what is real and what is constructed: fact and fiction become two in one flesh, the orchestrations of fiction inoculating fact inoculating fiction, on and on recursively — just as history repeats itself over and over, when we do not listen, until it grows hoarse (Tumbling Woman, 2023). The information superhighway paves the path for the Highway of Death. The fiction of images can take us to the fact of war.   

     

    Actors are treated like toys: the theater of war, arbitrated by images, adopts the levers of entertainment (Toy War, 2023). Pundits give the layperson a play-by-play. They want us to watch, enraptured. They speak of sides as if we were at a football game. The more outrageous the coverage they ejaculate, the higher the ratings. A highly rated president wins a second term. 

  • To become a highly rated president, you must responsibly govern your nation-state. A responsible nation-state must always be ready for...
    Farah Al Qasimi, Man and Horse, n.d., Archival Inkjet Print, 50.8 x 68.58 cm, Edition of 5, 2AP

    To become a highly rated president, you must responsibly govern your nation-state. A responsible nation-state must always be ready for war (Young Marine, n.d.). Paranoia flowers under the pretense of defense. Hunting is what you do to a wild animal before you skin them, dress them, and eat them. The United States grants itself a TERRORIST HUNTING PERMIT. It is a lifetime license. The threat can never be annihilated. It will last multiple lifetimes. This is red-blooded Americana, as American as a flamebroiled Angus beef patty with American cheese on a hearth-baked bun (Terrorist Hunting Permit, n.d.)

     

    Some animals can sense changes in the environment that escape humans. Some, like horses, can even forecast natural disaster (Man and Horse, n.d.). Humans are sense-making creatures, too. They are the only species that wage the material disaster of war. This is the age of the anthropocene.

  • The palm tree is a parable of history: some trees live for over a century, spanning wars come and gone,...
    Farah Al Qasimi, Flies on Camel, n.d., Archival Inkjet Print, 50.8 x 35.56 cm, Edition of 5, 2AP

    The palm tree is a parable of history: some trees live for over a century, spanning wars come and gone, humans born and dead. Like a palm tree left uncared for, or an empire caught up in its own decadence, the human imagination, too, is combustible, degenerating into flames under suboptimal conditions, like fear. 

     

    If blood spills (9/11), then the danger (terrorism) is real: so more blood must be spilled (Operation Iraqi Freedom) to annihilate the danger (Oriental Boulevard, n.d.). In this blood pact with safety, we must spill BLOOD to insure SAFETY. So, too, is the haematophagous fly drawn to the scent of a camel’s blood, feeding on it to stay alive (Flies on Camel, n.d.).

  • Arab Gulf women are known to wear heavy makeup. Women exchange the phrase ‘wishik yohmoul,’ — وشك يحمل— meaning your...
    Farah Al Qasimi, Security Camera, Yara, Pigeons on Pink Building, 2024, Archival Inkjet Print, 127 x 220.98 cm, Edition 1 of 5, 2AP

    Arab Gulf women are known to wear heavy makeup. Women exchange the phrase ‘wishik yohmoul,’ — ÙˆØ´Ùƒ يحمل— meaning your face and coloring can handle heavier makeup. This is also the manifestation-qua-lullaby the God-state whispers to itself every night. The state does itself up in the cosmetics of false victimhood, building itself up upon a foundation of fear, priming its subjects to numb themselves to death, concealing human rights violations (Crane Accident, 2017), highlighting the evil of the enemy, blending murder into righteousness, lining its eyes with the kohl of increasingly invasive surveillance systems (Yara, 2023). 

     

    A horse bucks when it senses danger and fears it cannot escape (Horse Bucking Teeth, n.d.). When danger is real, fear abounds. The powers that be recognize it as ammunition for a system of control. State becomes God. You enter the always-panopticon, subject to forever surveillance that does not guarantee safety any more than a fake security camera from the local dollar store.  (Security Camera, 2017).

  • This is Farah’s first exhibition featuring black and white images. “Black and white images automatically historicize,” she says. The glossy...
    Farah Al Qasimi, Jarash, n.d.,Archival Inkjet Print, 50.8 x 68.58 cm, Edition of 5, 2AP

    This is Farah’s first exhibition featuring black and white images. “Black and white images automatically historicize,” she says. The glossy veneer of history allows us to indulge in theory immune from personal responsibility. Too often, we forget that the now we live is but prototype for future history.

     

    The carrier pigeon, once used by the military to deliver messages, is now obsolete. And yet a trace of the true self exists in the new self: her descendent, the city pigeon, is itself a message — that of the enshittification of the messages in the images that surround us (Pigeons on Pink Building, 2024). 

  • We decode messages in the images we obtain through multiple degrees of separation necessarily mediated by a trust in the...
    Farah Al Qasimi, Machboos 2024, Archival Inkjet Print, 114.3 x 152.4 cm, Edition of 5, 2AP

    We decode messages in the images we obtain through multiple degrees of separation necessarily mediated by a trust in the network. We do not have access to the reality that dances forth the images: we must content ourselves with only the images. Eventually, the choreography halts (Baton Girls2019). The image-flood makes it easy to feel nothing when confronted with reality in the second degree. The luridity of pain is no longer inherited. Yet the ghosts of the images penetrate our consciousness, reverberating ad infinitum: chicken bones in basmati rice take on the aura of death by drone (Machboos, 2024). I know that the camel bones lying in the barren grass are innocuous victims of the cycle of life, but all I can think of are anonymous human remains, lying forgotten in decimated battlefields that will never bear another rose (Camel Bones n.d.).  

     

    Yet all we have are our sigils, these images. Without them, we lie alone, prostrate in the desert under a starless sky (Sand Dune, 2023).

     

     

    -  This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Hamed Butti Altamimi  -

  • About Farah Al Qasimi

    Farah Al Qasimi (b. 1991, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) makes photographs, films and music. Often working with large-scale vinyl imagery and a multiplicity of photographic prints and screens, Farah is interested in the internet and its hierarchies of information and emotion. Farah also loves the complexity of storytelling and value-building in children's cartoons, and many of her video works include primary narrators who are anthropomorphized. She has a highly collaborative practice and has worked with hand-sewn puppets, falcons, African Land Snails, exorcists, and most recently, a Jack Sparrow impersonator.

     

    Selected solo exhibitions include; Abort, Retry, Fail, Delfina Foundation, London, UK (2023); The Swarm, Plug in Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada (2023); Poltergeist, C/O Berlin, Germany (2023);  Star Machine, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia (2023); General Behaviour, Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi, UAE (2022); Surge, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, USA (2022); Everywhere there is splendor, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, USA (2021); Funhouse, Helena Anrather Gallery, NY, USA (2020); Back and Forth Disco, Public Art Fund, New York, NY, USA (2020); Open Arm Sea, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, TX, USA (2020); Arrival, The Third Line, Dubai, UAE (2019); List Projects: Farah Al Qasimi,MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, USA (2019); Artist's Rooms, Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE (2019); More Good News, Helena Anrather, New York (2017).

     

    Farah’s work has been acquired by prominent collections including but not limited to: Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi; Centre Pompidou, Paris; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), San Francisco; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), California; Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago; and Tate Modern, London.

  • About Sarah Chekfa

    Sarah Chekfa lives and writes in New York City. Her work has appeared in Flash Art, Vogue, The New York Review of Architecture, Do Not Research, and The Drunken Canal, among other publications.