Toy World by Farah Al Qasimi at The Third Line

The Third Line is pleased to announce Toy World, their fourth solo exhibition with Farah Al Qasimi. The show debuts a collection of still and moving images in black and white and colour.

Overview

Farah’s images are both real: organically taken in-the-world — and “fake”: staged, in her studio or elsewhere. Yet herimages, both real and “fake,” are all petals and no thorns. The unreality of contemporary life is inaugurated to the echelon of art object. In looking at these photographs, we role-play the time we spend looking at images online, unable to discern what is real and what is constructed: fact and fiction become two in one flesh, the orchestrations of fiction inoculating fact inoculating fiction, on and on recursively — just as history repeats itself over and over, when we do not listen, until it grows hoarse (Tumbling Woman, 2023). The information superhighway paves the path for the Highway of Death. The fiction of images can take us to the fact of war.   

Dedicated to the memory of Hamed Butti Altamimi, Toy World is Farah’s first exhibition featuring black and white images. “Black and white images automatically historicize,” she says. The glossy veneer of history allows us to indulge in theory immune from personal responsibility. Too often, we forget that the now we live is but prototype for future history.

Text by Sarah Chefka