“You are here, and it’s beautiful, and escaping isn’t always something bad.”
Through photography and film, Farah Al Qasimi captures glimpses of everyday life and the entangled relationship between identity, colonial legacy and globalised societies.
‘Abort, Retry, Fail’ takes its title from the computer error message that flashes up on Farah Al Qasimi’s now defunct family computer. It 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.
This exhibition brings together photography and film in an index of attempts to transcend the natural world 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 everyday life, where seemingly mundane places and objects converge in an attempt to reveal our estranged relationship to the natural world.
Our sometimes complex relationship with nature is further explored in Farah Al Qasimi’s film ‘Signs of Life’ also on show at Art Exchange.
You can find a filmed interview by Farah Al Qasimi on this show when it was at Delfina Foundation here.
You can read our Gallery Guide here: Gallery Guide – Abort Retry Fail
Artist’s Biography
Farah Al Qasimi (b. 1991, ARE) lives between New York and AbuDhabi. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Photography and Music from the Yale School of Art in 2017. Since then, her work has been acquired by prominent collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate Modern, London where she has a room dedicated to her work.
Solo exhibitions include The Third Line (2024), Delfina Foundation, London (2023) DC/O Berlin (2023); The Art Gallery of Western Australia (2023); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2021); Wayne State University Undergraduate Library, (2020); and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai (2019). In spring 2020, Public Art Fund showed her photographs at over 100 bus stops across New York City.
This exhibition was originally commissioned by Delfina Foundation with the generous support of Abu Dhabi Festival and Delfina Foundation’s Family of Supporters, 2023.
*Adventure games developed by Campo Santo. Released in February 2016
Images: ‘Anood Playing House Flipper’ and ‘Medeyyah Through The Gate’, 2023
