Farah Al Qasimi explores supernatural themes through photography, film, and music

Farah Al Qasimi, born in 1991 in Abu Dhabi and raised there before spending much of her life in the United States, creates work that examines the intersection of Emirati and American cultures. Her 2019 horror-comedy film Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire) investigates jinn, mythological trickster spirits, blending documentary and fictional elements. During the coronavirus quarantine in New York City this spring, Al Qasimi recorded an album in her bathroom while watching horror films by John Carpenter, including The Thing, which she uses to counteract anxiety. Her photography, featured in a solo show at Helena Anrather two years ago and on bus stops across New York City as part of Public Art Fund's Back and Forth Disco project, depicts contemporary Middle Eastern culture with hyperreal colors and patterns. Al Qasimi discusses her belief in the supernatural, citing experiences in her family's home near the haunted abandoned town of Jazirat Al Hamra in Ras al-Khaimah, and her interest in exorcisms, which have been outlawed in the Emirates. She avoids digitally altering her photographs, instead engineering situations to create magical experiences, and values responses from children, such as her nieces, to gauge her work's effectiveness. The artist also references Susan Sontag's On Photography and the Cottingley Fairies, exploring the tension between truth and fiction in photography.