![]() Through our free and searchable online archive-a virtual hub where a diverse cohort of artists and writers explore the creative process within a community of their peers and mentors. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward.Īnnually, BOMB serves 1.5 million online readers––44% of whom are under 30 years of age. Today, BOMB is a nonprofit, multi-platform publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. BOMB’s founders-New York City artists and writers-decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. Who or what determines what is or isn’t normal? The people populating the artist’s photographs cling to certain signifiers of one identity while relinquishing themselves to another.īOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. Making visible-in the quietest of moments-the compromises and concessions adopted in order to conform to a dominant worldview is often central to Al Qasimi’s project. Of course, assimilating to the norms of a certain culture’s values is in and of itself a kind of soft violence, one in which “forms of oppression and domination … become invisible-the new normal,” as Michel Foucault writes. Here, “normalcy” perseveres against all odds, with political tension and ethnic displacement ostensibly relegated to the backburner in a moment of intimate exchange. Refugees from Syria now living in suburban Detroit, the pair inhabit a room dominated by a bright red Elmo stuffed animal and a vanity littered with hairbrushes, fake flowers, and plastic water bottles-a nod to Flint, Michigan’s lead-laced water crisis. In Marwa Braiding Marah’s Hair (2019), one sister braids the other’s hair, as reflected in a large mirror decorated with stickers of flowers and girlish heroines. Shot in Abu Dhabi in the home of a friend of Al Qasimi, the image conveys a glut of pervasive, Western influence. This clash of cultures becomes more explicit in other works, like Noora’s Room (2020), which looks like a parody of a French Baroque bedroom, with its dolls, elaborately hung curtains, and ornate furniture seemingly lifted from Louis XIV’s Versailles. In another, Fairlane Mall (2019), a woman wearing a bright-green hijab moves a pawn in an oversized chess set, surrounded by groupings of white, American families. In one photograph, a window of a kid’s plastic playhouse found throughout suburbia opens to reveal … a goat. ![]() Al Qasimi has affixed on this disorienting, urban tableau a grouping of framed photographs of banal interiors pocked with weird abnormalities-a tension that runs throughout the show. One wall of Al Qasimi’s current exhibition at Helena Anrather is entirely papered over with an image of a lively street scene dominated by a building facade, which is itself plastered with knock-off signage in both English and Arabic. This almost hermetic quality gives Al Qasimi’s subjects an air of timeless placelessness. All of these instances help flesh out the exhibition’s title, FUNHOUSE nothing is as it seems, and everything refracts something else in a constant feedback loop of artifice and reflection. The car interior in Trompe L’oeil Car Seat (2019) is, like the aforementioned image, a study of pattern and surface, this time of upholstery that’s made to look tufted when it’s actually a printed pattern. A drying rack in another work is so festooned with bright, mismatched towels that it disappears under them entirely, while a garish carpet of red, white, and beige surrounding the rack turns the whole composition into a panoply of ad hoc, heterogenous patterns. In the artist’s photographs, cultural hybridity is viewed within a world of children’s TV characters and trinkets, toiletries and household goods-a kind of international style of consumerism that’s generic yet, in its own way, alluring.Ī bar of soap and the corner of a bathtub may seem unexceptional, but in Green Soap in Blue Bathroom (2020) their respective, pastel coloring is artificial to the point of looking unreal Al Qasimi zooms in on the composition to such a degree that they nearly become abstract. Hailing from Abu Dhabi and currently living between Dubai and Brooklyn, Al Qasimi captures the poetic beauty of everyday life seen through the specific lens of Arab American experience. Farah Al Qasimi’s photographs of domestic interiors, shopping malls, and other public and private spaces capture moments so unassuming that it almost seems as if blinking an eye might erase them entirely each image functions like a split second in time. ![]()
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