Farah Al Qasimi

Farah studied art formally, gaining a BA with Distinction in the Art Major at Yale University in 2012, and an MFA at Yale School of Art in 2017. However, she wasn’t originally drawn to photography; it was only while taking photographs for a digital colour class that she realised the camera’s potential to transform the everyday.

Now a practising artist in both Abu Dhabi and New York, her images of life in the Persian Gulf have attracted particular acclaim. Through a kaleidoscopic spectrum of staged and spontaneous scenes, Farah explores postcolonial structures of power, gender and taste.

Nominated for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award, Farah’s Imitations of Life, part of the festival’s ‘Emergences’, illustrates upper-middle class domesticity in the United Arab Emirates. Described as a ‘heterogeneous amalgam of tastes and values’, the compositions vividly evoke a sense of cultural hybridity and hypermodernity.

Farah’s recent exhibitions include several solo and group shows, notably at Helena Anrather in New York and The Third Line, Dubai, as well as the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Sharjah Art Foundation, Dubai.