Farah Al Qasimi
'Psychic Repair'
In Psychic Repair, photographer and musician Farah Al Qasimi activates the SCAD Museum of Art’s façade vitrines and an interior gallery through the play of scale and dimensionality. Informed by her girlhood in the UAE and experiences of womanhood in the U.S., Al Qasimi produces highly saturated images that explore rituals of self-presentation and their ties to identity, memory, and belief formation. Across photographic installations and music videos, she layers these images in a style reminiscent of early internet pop-up ads and department store displays, shifting fluidly between analog and digital modes. Patterns, textures, and shadows become conduits for fantasy and phantasm in her documentary photographs, while her music videos transform jump-rope rhymes, spoken poetry, and punk rock songs into prophetic mantras. Throughout the exhibition, the supernatural operates as a metaphor for the unseen, transient forces of contemporary beauty and fashion culture that shape how we see, feel, and behave.
In Psychic Repair, photographer and musician Farah Al Qasimi activates the SCAD Museum of Art’s façade vitrines and an interior gallery through the play of scale and dimensionality. Informed by her girlhood in the UAE and experiences of womanhood in the U.S., Al Qasimi produces highly saturated images that explore rituals of self-presentation and their ties to identity, memory, and belief formation. Across photographic installations and music videos, she layers these images in a style reminiscent of early internet pop-up ads and department store displays, shifting fluidly between analog and digital modes. Patterns, textures, and shadows become conduits for fantasy and phantasm in her documentary photographs, while her music videos transform jump-rope rhymes, spoken poetry, and punk rock songs into prophetic mantras. Throughout the exhibition, the supernatural operates as a metaphor for the unseen, transient forces of contemporary beauty and fashion culture that shape how we see, feel, and behave.
About the artist
Working across mediums of photography, film, and music, Farah Al Qasimi (b. 1991, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) interrogates the hierarchies of information and emotion inherent in the internet, embracing a multiplicity of screens and printing techniques including large-scale vinyl imagery. Many of her video works feature anthropomorphized narrators, informed by her interest in the complexity of storytelling and value-building in children’s cartoons. Through a highly collaborative practice, she has worked with hand-sewn puppets, falcons, African land snails, exorcists, and, most recently, a Jack Sparrow impersonator. Her work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Abu Dhabi. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Delfina Foundation in London, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
Credits
Psychic Repair is organized by SCAD Museum of Art associate curator Brittany Richmond and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2026.
