Rubberneck by Farah Al Qasimi at François Ghebaly

Rubberneck opens ahead of Al Qasimi’s forthcoming institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in January 2027.

Overview

François Ghebaly is proud to present Rubberneck, Farah Al Qasimi’s second solo exhibition at the gallery and first presentation at the Beverly Hills location. Rubberneck opens ahead of Al Qasimi’s forthcoming institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in January 2027.

 Farah Al Qasimi creates films, photographs, and installations that catch on the unmistakable idioms of contemporary life. Drawing from a wellspring of visual touchstones, Al Qasimi’s images place the symbols and symptoms of globalization, cultural dissemination, nationalism, and the online in unexpected arenas of daily life. Her newest exhibition, Rubberneck, brings together 15 new photographs alongside vinyl interventions. With wit and her signature vividness, Al Qasimi condenses the fundamentally disjunctive quality of contemporary life.

 In Rubberneck, Al Qasimi lends a renewed eye to genre, taking pages from cinematic horror and science-fiction. She deftly wields both their strategies and tropes, constructing bold, evocative tableaux whose locales span arid West Texas, New York City, Dearborn, Michigan, Los Angeles and the UAE. As the exhibition title suggests, Al Qasimi’s Rubberneck is rife with the traces of catastrophe. The term “rubbernecking” describes that “can’t-look-away” gawking pull or voyeuristic instinct that one experiences toward disasters that are seemingly not one’s own. The work Computer Room (Oil Fires) (2026) shows an intimate view of a warm, wood-panelled home office. From the desk below, a plastic E.T., an engraved plaque of Lebanon, a baseball trophy, and a winged doll of Elsa from Disney’s Frozen look on placidly as the above computer monitor shows a video of hellish flames spilling from the earth. In this work and others, Al Qasimi’s strange portents pair almost familiarly with the everyday.

 Borrowing from both film and literature, many of Al Qasimi’s new images consider the clichéd subaltern roles of children, animals, and outsiders as clairvoyants for imminent tumult, or for worlds beyond ours. In Xanti with Snow Globe (2024), a young boy holds a snow globe directly to his eye, appearing to lens the world around him as though the globe were a crystal ball, rather than to examine the miniature inside. Glow-in-the-dark stars affixed to the wall behind him recall a child’s view of the cosmos. And in Horse in Swimming Pool (2025), a horse flexes its haunches and whips its tail as teal-blue waters encircle. Though the image components are innocuous enough, something about the scene scans with an unplaceable danger or warning.

 Dovetailing the show's canny interplay between the alien and the familiar is the undercurrent of a repressed or domesticated instinct for the unknown. Al Qasimi’s portrayal of animal-human relationships exemplifies this friction. Pigeon with Bracelets (2026) shows a bird’s taloned, almost reptilian feet extending from silver jewelry installed by a no-doubt doting owner. On examination, the word “l o v e” is inscribed again and again on medallions that decorate the bird’s fetter-like leg cuffs. With no easy synthesis, Al Qasimi’s Rubberneck presents a ballad of vividly contemporary irreconcilabilities: of love nested inside capture, training within acculturation, desire in fear.

About The Artist

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. Al Qasimi 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.