July 30–October 20, 2019
Working in photography, video, and performance, Farah Al Qasimi (b.1991, United Arab Emirates; lives and works in New York and Dubai) considers how images inscribe identity along the lines of gender, nationality, and class. List Projects: Farah Al Qasimi is the artist’s first solo exhibition at a United States institution, premiering her new 40-minute video Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire) (2019) and exhibiting a selection of recent photographs, including Living Room Vape (2017) and A’s Reflection (2019).
Imbuing her sumptuous visuals with a near-editorial sensibility, Al Qasimi’s still and moving images facilitate a range of subtle interventions that manipulate codified expectations of how images are constructed and understood between Euro-American and Middle Eastern cultural contexts. Camouflage and concealment play a central role in Al Qasimi’s work. She employs these strategically to level covert critiques of the gender divide in the Gulf States, examining its colonial and religious origins. In her frequent juxtapositions of hybrid cultural objects and sites, the artist’s images explore symbolic capital, and confront national identity in its relationship to consumerism and taste. As she embeds her work with double meanings, Al Qasimi’s images are as intricate and seductive as they are incisive in their criticality.
Al Qasimi’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; the San Francisco Arts Commission; the CCS Bard Galleries at the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-On-Hudson, New York; Helena Anrather, New York; and The Third Line, Dubai. Al Qasimi received her MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has participated in residencies at the Delfina Foundation, London; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; and is a recipient of the New York NADA Artadia Prize and the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship.
List Projects: Farah Al Qasimi is organized by Henriette Huldisch, Director of Exhibitions & Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.
Exhibitions at the List Center are made possible with the support of Fotene Demoulas & Tom Coté, Audrey & James Foster, Idee German-Schoenheimer, Joyce Linde, Cynthia & John Reed, and Terry & Rick Stone. In-kind media sponsorship provided by 90.9 WBUR. Additional funding for List Projects is also provided by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
General operating support is provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Council for the Arts at MIT; Philip S. Khoury, Associate Provost at MIT; the MIT School of Architecture + Planning; the Mass Cultural Council; and many generous individual donors. The Advisory Committee Members of the List Visual Arts Center are gratefully acknowledged.
