FARAH AL QASIMI

Born 1991 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Lives and works in Dubai, United Arab Emirates and Brooklyn, United States.
Farah Al Qasimi studied photography and music at Yale University, and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2017. Working primarily with photography, video, and performance, she examines postcolonial structures of power, gender, and taste in the Gulf Arab states and in the United States. Her practice incorporates social critique embedded in close observation of the multiple environments in which she works. She plays with the uncanny geographies informed by migration, displacement, and foreign intervention and also considers the diaspora in her works.
Her recent commission with Public Art Fund, Back and Forth Disco, was on view at 100 bus shelters in New York City in 2019–20. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Stavanger Art Museum, Norway; Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai; San Francisco Arts Commission; CCS Bard Galleries at the Hessel Museum of Art, New York; Helena Anrather, New York; The Third Line, Dubai; The List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge; Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto; and the Houston Center for Photography.
She has participated in residencies at the Delfina Foundation, London; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; and is a recipient of the New York NADA Artadia Prize; Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship; and this year’s Capricious Photo Award.
Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; and Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam.