Bringing Farah Al Qasimi to Art Exchange

It was raining the proverbial cats and dogs but I was undeterred because Farah Al Qasimi’s exhibition Abort, Retry, Fail had reached the Top 5 shows to see in London and I was going to visit it regardless. The exhibition didn’t disappoint. So much so that a few months later we’ve brought it to Art Exchange.

Abort, Retry, Fail

Abort, Retry, Fail takes its title from the computer error message that flashes up on Farah Al Qasimi’s now defunct family computer. It had connected her to the outside world and was a portal to escape from reality through gaming – as a pirate, a gun slinging biker, or a tiny ball bouncing off the edges of the screen.

Farah Al Qasimi, Dolphin Fountain, 2023

This exhibition brings together photography and film in an attempt to transcend everyday life through entering fictional realities. We see gamers transported elsewhere – absorbed in fantasy realms of exploration, escapism and play. Interspersed amongst these images are photographs that capture overlooked moments of daily life, where seemingly mundane places and objects converge, revealing our estranged relationship to the natural world. This sometimes complex relationship with nature is further explored in the artist’s film Signs of Life.

Signs of Life

Lying comfortably on the pile of mattresses and cushions that are part of the show, I watched Signs of Life and was taken on a journey which starts as a video game: we are given instruction on our role and what our quest will look like. Along the way we have to make choices that will impact on the natural world. The film is enchantingly beautiful, while presenting us with what Al Qasimi refers to as ‘triggers’ – moments that ask us to think about the ecological issues at stake in the world around us.

Farah Al Qasimi, Gia Wearing Contact Lenses, 2023

This is how the photographs in the show operate also – with uncanny moments making you pause and look twice. Attention is often elsewhere, directed on something beyond the picture. For example, in Gia Wearing Contact Lenses her eyes and neck are eerily green from the reflected light of a screen she’s staring at, while in another photograph we glimpse a young man through a cluster of bottles, his eyes pointedly fixed on a screen we can’t see.

Home, migration, and confinement

Farah Al Qasimi, Anood Playing House Flipper, 2023

Wider themes are also explored in Farah Al Qasimi’s work. It is hard to look at Anood Playing House Flipper and not recognise how the Internet has changed the lives of many women in the Middle East – an outside world opening up from inside the home. Yet we are also reminded of a sense of confinement in Medeyyah Through the Gate, where a single finger of a woman’s hand manages to slip out towards us from a tiny gap in a gate.

Farah Al Qasimi, Medeyyah Through the Gate, 2023

Colonial legacy is explored in many of Al Qasimi’s works, where a photograph of a pile of colourful blankets in a market – much the same as the cheap mattresses covering the floor of our Project Space – are indicative of the recently arrived migrant, as they hastily make a home in a new land. There is a sense of Europe’s legacy continuing to be played out today; wherever the British have once drawn a line on a map or referred to land as “terra nullius” we stirred up trouble for the future. 

Escape

We have every reason to desire an escape from the real world these days, to have some time out gaming - or whatever form of escapism works for you – and then to return to the real world re-energised and ready to take it on again. Farah Al Qasimi’s Abort, Retry, Fail offers us both, it is an exhibition that actively critiques the world around us, while acknowledging our need to get away from it. 

Farah Al Qasimi’s Abort, Retry, Fail continues at Art Exchange until 9 November. 

To find out more, visit the exhibition page on the Art Exchange website.