Farah Al Qasimi: Desert Dreamscape
Farah Al Qasimi: Desert Dreamscape
In the Room
Orb
The light-up orb reproduces a souvenir Al Qasimi picked up at the Dragon Mart mall in one of Dubai’s free-trade zones on the city’s outskirts. It came with a mini CD for set-up, but because the instructions were in Chinese, the artist never got it to work. Al Qasimi used this purchase as a jumping off point, imagining a device for receiving calls. The globe flashes and spins, announcing “voicemail from Diamond,” while the incoming message plays (featuring a vocal cameo from artist and actor Diamond Stingily). The orb is part of a larger exploration throughout Al Qasimi’s practice conveying the aesthetics and enchantments of mass-produced imports
Standing Mirror
Postcards and family photos are tacked up on the full-length mirror, a familiar ad hoc approach to décor, slipping the ephemera into the space between the glass and frame. Another touch of impromptu styling, a string of prayer beads (Tasbih) hangs from the mirror’s ornate frame. Expounding on how a mirror’s function is to reflect back one’s image, this is a conceptual self-portrait through an assemblage of mementos and personal effects. Al Qasimi sourced the photographs from an old family album while the postcards are strangers’ correspondence she ordered from Beirut online. These intimate decorative touches are highly personal and universal at the same time.
Cleopatra
You may have seen Cleo, the dog, in Al Qasimi’s photographic work before. Here the German Shepherd-Chihuahua mix rests at the foot of the bedspread. It’s a collision of Al Qasimi’s present and past. It imagines her current pet, which she adopted from a shelter in rural Texas, inside a model of her childhood bedroom in the UAE. In real life, Cleo is protective of Al Qasimi, always anxiously keeping guard while the artist sleeps. The canine companion has been photographed before on a bed of floral-print pillows, next to an upholstered headboard.
TV
Anyone born before 1997 when flat screen models were introduced likely has fond memories of CRT TVs. Having a tube of your own in the bedroom was both a status symbol and teen fantasy back then. While today smartphone and computer screens (like the one you’re reading this on) offer personal portals to other worlds, television was the dominant immersive media when Al Qasimi was growing up. In this way, her virtual experience contains a nod to its own pre-digital predecessors. While today spotting a CRT TV in a home is rare, due to the quality of the display, it’s still a popular format for presenting video works at art institutions. A Sony set, for example, featured in the installation of Al Qasimi’s recent exhibition Toy World.
Adorn your screen with a magical mirage
A rendition of artist Farah Al Qasimi’s dreamscape ambience is available for your mobile and desktop screens. Wherever you take the desert bedroom on your screen, share a photo and tag @hyundai.artlab.
About the Desert Dreamscape digital commission
Artist Farah Al Qasimi created a virtual dreamscape, bringing to life a bedroom in the desert viewers can enter and explore. The digital environment extends Al Qasimi’s narrative-rich study illustrating enchantment and longing through photographic tableaux of commodity objects and décor. Motifs from the artist’s photographs are reproduced in the dreamscape while the bedroom simulation also borrows from the soft aesthetics of ASMR videos where ambient soundscapes paired with lofi renders build surprisingly immersive fantasy worlds.
Throughout her practice, Al Qasimi recreates scenes based on memories, blending fiction and reality as individual and collective mythologies are expressed through the nuances and decorations of interior space. Modeled after the artist’s 1980s childhood bedroom, the simulation evokes a haunting nostalgia enhanced by the soundscape’s eerie wind chimes. Empty of any figures, the only human presence is a disembodied voice in the form of voicemails left by a friend, performed by artist and actor Diamond Stingily.
Al Qasimi’s photographs are known for tensions between intimacy and distance, private and virtual, global and vernacular. How the viewer is transported into an immersive otherworldly experience is referenced by the artwork: the bedroom world populated with shimmering screens, windows, mirrors, and a tabletop orb—all portals. More than a momentary diversion of escapist reverie, this artwork is an opportunity to meditate on constellations of refuge and desire. Blending AI-inspired surrealism and Al Qasimi’s family history, the dreamscape furthers the artist’s investigation into how hyperconnected global culture shapes our concept and experience of place.
Desert Dreamscape is currently featured in Sympoiesis: Co-Creating Sense of Place Sympoiesis: Co-Creating Sense of Place, an exhibition at the University of Wyoming Art Museum on view from November 23, 2024 – November 8, 2025 and was featured in Glimmer, an exhibition at Art Exchange on view from November 15, 2024 - February 1, 2025.
About the Artist
Farah Al Qasimi
Farah Al Qasimi makes photographs, films and music. Often working with large-scale vinyl imagery and a multiplicity of photographic prints and screens, she is interested in the internet and its hierarchies of information and emotion. Farah loves the complexity of storytelling and value-building in children's cartoons, and many of her video works include primary narrators who are anthropomorphized. Through a highly collaborative practice, she has worked with hand-sewn puppets, falcons, African Land Snails, exorcists, and most recently, a Jack Sparrow impersonator. Her work is in the collections of MoMA New York, Tate Modern, Guggenheim New York and Abu Dhabi, and she has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Delfina Foundation in London, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa.
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