Beneath the Surface
1 Farah Al Qasimi
NEW YORK
In Farah Al Qasimi’s photography, what isn’t visible is just as important as what is. The Abu Dhabi-born artist, who graduated from Yale University in 2017 with an MFA in photography, often partially obscures her subjects, highlighting the ways in which our perceptions of identity are reliant on contextual details that, in Al Qasimi’s works, are notably absent.
In her practice, Al Qasimi grapples with notions of Arab masculinity and visibility in the post-9/11 American landscape. For example, in (2017), we see the silhouette of a man standing behind a lectern, the only visible elements of his identity being his beard and turban—details that are frequently codified by the
