The photographers exchange thoughts on The Little Mermaid, the climate crisis, and on charting the invisible.
Known for her seductive and disquieting photographs and videos of “globalized post-internet aesthetic,” Farah Al Qasimi has been a critical creative voice for almost a decade. Training her lens on domestic and public landscapes (and inhabitants) of consumer culture in the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere, she aims to expose “layers of aesthetic translation.”
Al Qasimi’s photographs taken in the Gulf region are windows into a particular blend of futurism and kitsch that results from shifting economics and cross-cultural legacies; they reveal tradition hybridized by technology and commercialization. The artist’s distinctive method of displaying framed photographs, flat-screen monitors, and smartphones (playing videos) on top of large-scale wallpapered images echoes advertisements and algorithms.
Nature and artifice, the private and the public, the paradoxical and the sublime, nostalgia and crisis all exist together in Al Qasimi’s images—and do so without irony or sarcasm. They are still lifes of a jumbled free-market globalism and bear witness to, in the artist’s words, “a sort of broken-telephone game of cultural interpretation happening.”
A recent body of work, exhibited as Surge, brings together eighteen photographs taken in the UAE nearly two years into the pandemic. Formally, the photographs evoke the spatial isolation that marked this time for many of us. But more importantly, the series is a reflection on desire in the context of consumerism and climate change. The Little Mermaid fairy tale serves as a metaphor for “land-bound” desire and as a comment on the environmental impact of large coastal economies. Al Qasimi’s serene yet unsettling images hint at alarming contemporary realities like aridification and desertification, the risks of desalination, and a global water scarcity crisis underway. The works raise questions such as: How far will we allow capitalism to harness and exploit our desires? How much are we willing to sacrifice?
Born in Abu Dhabi in 1991, Al Qasimi received her MFA at the Yale School of Art and currently lives between Brooklyn and Dubai. Ever since meeting fellow photographer Elle Pérez at the New York Times’s Portfolio Review in 2015, the two artists are in frequent contact. In this conversation they revisit some fundamental questions about taking and showing pictures.
—Elle Pérez
Elle Pérez
Hello! I’m so excited to be doing this with you.
Farah Al Qasimi
Me too. The last time we had a formal conversation for a publication was seven years ago when we were brand-new friends. You were leaving Yale, and I was entering Yale, and we talked about our adolescences, and the hardcore and punk shows we went to. Mine happened in places like kids’ party rooms rented at McDonald’s.
EP
(laughter) The ones I went to happened in our church basement.
FAQ
That’s cooler, ’cause that’s kind of anti-establishment.
EP
In any event, it says something about our mutual practices. Your emotional punk show is definitely in a McDonald’s kid’s play room, and my punk show is definitely in a church basement.
FAQ
I feel like my vibe is Ronald McDonald if he was a member of Black Flag.
EP
(laughing for a significant amount of time) I would like the transcript to read “is laughing for a significant amount of time.”
FAQ
While eating blood sugar fries. (laughter)
EP
I’m eating blood sugar fries because I have taught all day, which
I know is a life that you understand.
FAQ
Oh yeah, for sure.
EP
Continuing with our adolescent theme, what other things from your youth have influenced the way you see, think about, and make art?
FAQ
Cartoons were this crucial window into the life that I wanted to live but couldn’t. Recently, I was sick and needed something comforting, so I rewatched a few episodes of Hey Arnold! I used to love that cartoon. When I was a child, it felt so radical and beautiful to me: all these kids from the same neighborhood who were so different could just come together and hang out and play hockey or baseball in the street. They knew everyone and all the adults knew them. They had autonomy and a relationship to public space that I never really had. I mean, I had a good childhood. I had friends and we did what we could within the confines of where we were, but the freedom of Hey Arnold! seemed utopic. I also loved All That—basically any Nickelodeon show with fart or slime humor. And I loved Stick Stickly, the popsicle stick with googly eyes who was their mascot for a while.
EP
You’d have a really hard time selling that right now—a stick with a face.
FAQ
Stick Stickly had a whole personality. He was kind of frantic and nervous and talked in this high-pitched voice. When I started thinking about character development or later about character acting, I realized all of those characters I grew up with did not look very advanced or nuanced, but they still felt human to me—they seemed real. I’m thirty-one, and I still think about Stick Stickly.
EP
That makes a lot of sense to me, thinking about all the characters that I’ve come to know and love in your work, specifically in your videos. Recently, I was watching Sesame Street with a friend’s toddler and all I could think about was your work. (laughter) What I like about it is that your work always makes me think about how we learn. Especially in your video Everybody—
FAQ
—Everybody was Invited to a Party.
EP
I want to call Everybody your Sesame Street. It’s teaching me something. I think it’s the closest I’ve been to being a child.
FAQ
Aw!
EP
Now that I’m an adult, I watch Sesame Street and understand what is being said. With Everybody I get to be in a space where I don’t understand because I don’t speak Arabic—but wanting to understand it, while also thinking about contextual meaning. I don’t know if the meaning is discussed or introduced, though.
FAQ
That’s a question that has been prickling me recently. I’ve been making a lot of photographs and asking myself how much of the work I want to be legible without added context or writing, and how much of it I want to be obscure or felt.
There’s this expectation that photography should deliver a certain kind of meaning that is more connected to truth or information like location, time, demographic. But that reduces it to an index. We have this common language that is the world and how it looks—but it’s constantly being filtered through everyone’s different subjectivities. For example, we often talk about how our TikTok algorithms deliver different things to us—mine is usually New Jersey moms and crime-scene-cleanup videos.
What keeps me coming back to photography is its slipperiness. The way we feel about a photograph is usually linked to the way we feel about what is being photographed, not just how it’s being photographed. Like when we see a Robert Frank photograph of a baby crawling on the floor, there’s humor, but also concern because it looks like the jukebox could fall on the kid.
EP
Right.
FAQ
Or a photograph by Diane Arbus, which is a complicated example because the reading of her work has shifted so much since she was alive and making it. We are thinking about ourselves in relationship to these people who were photographed, and we’re thinking about the photographer in relationship to these people.
EP
With the Arbus images, I feel like there was a distinction between the people who would be viewing those photographs and the people in them. Now the people who are in the photographs are also making photographs and viewing photographs.
There’s this one Arbus picture of three Puerto Rican women, I think on Columbus or Amsterdam Avenue, and it’s just incredible to have that kind of record of a gaze. Or Frank’s photograph with the three queer people—one person is totally giving a look, another is hiding their face, and the third is sort of observing what’s going on. It’s such a proof of life in a way that you rarely get.
FAQ
Yeah.
EP
In so many ways, I feel like you are speaking to the future, making work for the future. While we’re being surrounded by the present moment, there are certain things that are invisible to us but in five or ten years they might be more understood.
FAQ
That’s a generous read. What I will say is that I grew up in a society that was so new, it felt almost mushy, malleable—it was constantly shifting around me and I could never get a grasp on it. That has shaped me more than anything else: there were these unnamable things unfolding around me that I didn’t understand except in image. One of the first things I photographed consistently were these murals of waterfalls and landscapes all around the Emirates. I liked them because they brought me somewhere else, and I always wanted to be somewhere else—and then later I realized they were indicative of this disembodied feeling that was particular to the place. Like, what if it could be something else in five, ten, fifteen years . . . that striving and its inevitable failures. I can’t even really articulate it now, but it’s in the photographs.
EP
You seem to be very selective in what you choose to photograph and conscious around how you photograph it, without being overly declarative or definitive. Your sense of humor throws a wrench into any kind of comfortable assumption of what the work is, if that makes sense.
FAQ
It does make sense.
EP
So, what do you think about photography?
FAQ
Oh my god!
EP
Why do you use it?
FAQ
Because it’s about relationships, and it’s about processing the world in a way that allows you to move through it and funnel frustration or anger into questioning. Questioning feels more productive than . . .
EP
Writing? It’s so easy to be declarative with writing, but it’s really hard to be declarative with photography.
FAQ
Exactly. It is kind of a miracle that I’m still doing it because I am so socially anxious. It requires me to be outside talking to people, and that’s vulnerable. This didn’t come naturally to me. I was definitely charmed by the magic of the darkroom, but even more so by its loneliness. Enjoying the process of taking the pictures happened much later.
When I started taking art classes in college, I was moving through a very hard time, maybe my first real understanding of depression or grief, so I flung myself into the darkroom and the painting studio. And then I couldn’t stop. It became this panicked obsession with organizing the world as if organizing the world gave me some sense that I might be able to possibly control what happens next. That fallacy is so human, and I’ve always felt drawn to it.
EP
How do you feel about organizing the world now?
FAQ
I’ve been working in academia since college; so for ten years, it had to happen only in short, hysterical bursts. I just committed to not teaching for the time being—which feels crazy—but I’m ready to learn how to work slower, steadier.
Bodies of work that resonate with me are usually made by artists who are trying to make sense of the world by engaging with it. I feel like that effort, that searching, comes out in a certain way. You can tell when a photographer is complacent or maybe solely interested in beauty, and you can tell when someone’s interested in friction. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.
But I think a lot about Roy DeCarava who’s doing so much with darkness—you get the sense that he’s seeking something, he’s looking for something that is there, but it’s not easily seen. That’s a tough approach, but it’s one that I admire. How do you photograph an energy? How do you photograph a feeling? How do you show someone evidence of something invisible?
EP
Exactly!
FAQ
And then, sometimes I’m interested in backing that up with research or in filling it out in the studio or finding other ways to bring fiction into it. But ultimately, photography is the medium for me because it feeds that need to face some of the terrors of being alive.
EP
Yo, that is so true! I just want to hear like, how do you do that? How do you photograph a feeling? How do you photograph a metaphysical space? It’s like alchemy. I’m wondering, what’s your mix? (laughter)
FAQ
I don’t know. I mean, how do you do that? You do that so well—
EP
But this interview is about you.
FAQ
I don’t think it starts out with an intention. It starts with an impulse. I follow the impulse and then I stop and look at the work and listen to it, and then I keep going. This last body of work that I’m showing in LA started when I went home to Abu Dhabi in December of 2021. I hadn’t been home in over a year and was really excited to be back. Then Omicron began surging, and all of a sudden, all these plans I had made collapsed—plans to see people, make photographs, and work on this film, all of it went away. It felt like 2020 all over again.
EP
Oh my God.
FAQ
And it was the only time that I could work on it because the spring semester was going to start, and I had a three-class load. There was a sense of urgency because I really missed the luxury of just being a photographer. I’ve really enjoyed supporting students, giving them advice about making their work and setting their own parameters for risk, but I felt unable to do that for myself.
I did end up working a lot in Abu Dhabi but it was with more distance. And now that I look at it, I can really feel my sadness in those pictures.
EP
Where do you see it?
FAQ
I see it in other people. I see it in the distance between myself and them. I see it in my own avoidance. I see it in the color palette—more somber and constrained than what I’m used to. I see it in the things that I chose to point my camera at, which I would not have chosen before. When I first looked at those pictures, I felt like, Ugh, where’s the exuberance that I usually try to see, the humor, the surprise, the peculiarity? Where’s the subversion? And then I thought, Maybe it’s okay that I’m not finding these things. Maybe the photographs aren’t exuberant because I didn’t feel happy, and that’s fine. There is longing there instead.
EP
Totally.
FAQ
Unrequited longing. The new pictures came together as a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. The non-Disney version has a tragic ending because the consequence of the mermaid’s longing is death. The prince does not love her back and chooses to marry someone else. When she is given the choice to either kill him or to die herself, she chooses her own death.
EP
Wow. How did this become the frame for your work?
FAQ
So much of the energy in those photographs came from an impossible desire to be jolted out of my own reality and into an unfamiliar one. So there’s personal narrative, but the sense of danger that accompanies forbidden desire is something that applies beyond the personal—I had also been thinking a lot about my childhood by the sea, and the way capitalism has transformed our coastline into something dead and inaccessible.
When I was growing up, we had the 1975 anime version of The Little Mermaid on Betamax, which was pre-VHS. This version is so sad because it follows the original script. The death scene has haunted me forever. She turns into these beautiful multicolored bubbles and just floats into the air. And as she dies, her friend Fritz, a tiny cute dolphin, swims after the bubbles, going “Marina! Marina!” Every time I hear it in my head, my eyes fill up with tears—I’m crying now—because I’m thinking, She left her life behind for love, and this person didn’t love her back. The tragedy of love is such a dark thing to introduce to young kids.
EP
Especially in this way.
FAQ
Maybe that’s why I remember it so deeply. So, I can take my emotional response to that and use it as fuel to understand something else. In my show at François Ghebaly this summer, there was a photograph of what I call my “depression water bottles” partially obscuring a TV screen that’s playing the 1975 Little Mermaid. When I was home during the pandemic, I had one little spot on the couch where I ended up working all the time, editing whatever lonely photographs I scrounged from the Omicron world, and I collected all these water bottles around that space. There’s a huge pollution problem in the Emirates, as in so many coastal cities around the world. It was hard not to see the bottles and The Little Mermaid together and think of death.
I ended up spending a lot of time around the ocean, but also in places where the ocean was displaced, like salt lakes where seawater gets dredged up to the surface. These places have become sites of public interest where people will hang out and go on dates and stuff.
But I’m thinking about the sadness of a beautiful landscape that’s mistreated and exploited so harshly. We have these beautiful, natural marvels and then there’s trash everywhere. So for me, the work is about looking at beauty and tragedy and harnessing my emotional response to it—and using that as the catalyst for other modes of searching that are more didactic in terms of understanding something real.
EP
Mm-hmm. I really feel that longing and the distance in the new pictures, especially the photograph of three women taking a walk on the beach. As a viewer, you just feel the desire to be with them, because they’re pretty . . . (laughter) I’m so gay. Well, they’re really beautiful. And you can tell that they are friends and they care for each other. The photograph is taken from the distance from which you would photograph a beautiful bird—
FAQ
Yeah, you can’t get too close.
EP
But then there’s some closeness that feels distant—like that photograph, it feels intimate. In another portrait, the person is cast in this blue light and you’re so close to them, but they feel far away, in their own emotions or something. So the way you’re working with distance and longing is really interesting.
FAQ
Hearing you say that back to me, I keep thinking it’s impossible for the pandemic not to have affected my work. I think that’s true for everyone. What it did for me is sort of flatten the space between strangers in a weird way, even though it also lengthened the distance. I remember in the early days after the lockdown eased up, walking past someone and getting a whiff of their perfume, or aftershave, or deodorant, or just their natural smell. It felt so enchanting and so dizzying because the novelty of unfamiliar presence was something that many of us didn’t feel for so long—
EP
Yeah.
FAQ
Many people might say this, but 2021 may have actually been the hardest year of my life in a lot of ways. I felt like I was constantly in the batting cages. Sometimes, you hear heartbreaking, terrible news when you’re outside in public, and groups of people around you carry on with their days like normal. Something about peering into that normalcy and how strong the desire is to step outside of your reality and into theirs—at least for me, how badly, in those moments, I would want to run up to people and say, “Please, please take me with you.” I’d want to sit outside this coffee shop with this group of friends having brunch together. The desire to leap over these invisible barriers that divide experiences in public space and cast away my own and take on somebody else’s experience.
So yeah, I’m trying to acknowledge and collapse the space between me and strangers. And that’s why I often default to not showing people’s faces because that way they can really exist in this space in between friend and stranger.
EPSomething I always wanted to know about your work is how you choose the images that go behind other images and act as wallpaper? I don’t know if that’s even the right thing to call them.
FAQ
You mean, how do I choose what images get layered on top of what?
EP
Yeah. How do you develop that hierarchy? Is it even a hierarchy?
FAQ
A lot of that decision making depends on the space that the work’s being showed in. Like, how much context does it need? How much spatial trickery do I want? If there’s a figure, what scale do I want it to be? It has to do with how to transform a space in two dimensions. Sometimes the relationships are clear and dependent on the interior architecture. The show that I did at the CAM St. Louis was less about creating a space, and more about creating these layers of archival and contemporary images that would weave in and out of the plane of the wall. So there were framed works that I made in the studio and then there were little motifs that would run throughout the wallpaper as well. For the viewer, it was a sequential experience. But with certain smaller spaces, I find that it’s more fun to actually include something that has an architectural detail in it, so you’re not sure what’s in the image and what’s in the space.
For my gallery show in LA, we included this wallpaper of an image that I took of a building lobby and there’s this male figure in it who’s turned away from me. But he’s looking in a mirror and he’s making eye contact with himself. There’s also a monitor over the top of this wallpaper. For me, that was great because it placed the video piece in the visual world in which it was filmed, and the image in the wallpaper also includes many framed photographs so it does that spatial trickery.
I mock things up in Photoshop or I make these maquettes, where I print out images and I actually look at them in three-dimensional space and layer things in them. But a lot of it is a process of intuition and of trial and error. But I’ve had to work with some funny spaces before . . . .
EP
I was just reminded of that story that you told me about this photograph I love so much, which you made in your dorm room at Yale, of the palm trees.
FAQ
Oh yeah, where I bought it on allposters.com to remind myself of anywhere else. Just like the murals.
But I didn’t put it up very well—
EP
—and it started to split. There’s a certain craftiness to it that has to do with insisting on making a space your own, regardless of where that is, and then the fantasy of that image crumbling at the same time. You are so good at making works that contain these simultaneous realities or simultaneous truths. It allows these different registers to all exist in the same image. That’s why they are so rich and effective as pictures. And your deftness with color and form and the way you work with the camera opens up something, opens up a question you can’t put back or uncrack in your mind. (laughter) I said that. Oh God.
Tell me about your obsession with horror films. Do you have any favorites?
FAQ
Oh, yeah, I have a whole list:
The Shining. Eyes Without a Face. The Eyes of Laura Mars. The Thing. Alien and Aliens. Killer Klowns from Outer Space . . . .
I love horror and true crime because I’m an anxious person. There are two types of anxious people—there’s the person who is so disturbed by something that they need to avoid exposure to it, and the person who is so disturbed by something that they need to know absolutely everything about it in the event that it happens to them. I’m in the latter camp, so I need to know what people did in situations where they either were or weren’t murdered because maybe it’ll help me one day. I watch a lot of Forensic Files, too. If I can sit and concentrate my anxiety at a specific source, it’s helpful.
EP
Oh my goodness.
FAQ
Yeah, it’s . . . pretty dark.
EP
I have one final question for you. If you could have any magical power what would it be? Mine would be to speak in every language. Then I could pronounce the titles of your films with more confidence.
FAQ(laughter) Um, my power would definitely be teleportation.
EP
Where would you go?
FAQ
Home.
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