Whenever Farah Al Qasimi visits her parents in Abu Dhabi, the Brooklynite artist chooses to sleep in her sister’s childhood bedroom. She is not sure where all her rock band posters have gone, but her parents’ decision to ‘update’ her room in a grey palette puts her off. “My sister’s room has still retained a little bit of that colourfulness,” she tells Canvas. Beyond simply representing the likenesses of Ozzy Osbourne or Metallica, for Al Qasimi – much like any millennial – those posters represented senses of belonging and rebelliousness alike. A capsule of self-expression on steroids against a world that refuses to cooperate, a teenage bedroom is a land of yearning for both acceptance and refusal. The artist refers to American photographer Adrienne Salinger’s seminal 1995 publication, In My Room: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms, for a “rich material” of “needing constant external reaffirmation of who we are back then”.
Al Qasimi’s upcoming exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) museum, entitled Psychic Repair, captures these moments of combat between self-assurance and doubt through densely layered photographs of interiors, as well as short films.
Words by Osman Can Yerebakan.
The full profile is available in Canvas Issue 121.
