NEW YORK, NY.- Public Art Fund debuted Back and Forth Disco, a 100-site photography exhibition by artist Farah Al Qasimi. For this new body of work, Al Qasimi, who works between Brooklyn and Dubai, has created 17 photographs that explore the beauty of ephemeral moments amidst a city’s visual and audible noise. For the first time, Al Qasimi has taken New York City as her subject matter. Focusing primarily on immigrant neighborhoods that resonate with her own experience, she photographs local communities where small businesses thrive. Al Qasimi captures vibrant instances of self-expression that break through the chaos and anonymity of the city: a woman dressed in a bright yellow jacket and elaborate hair accessory talking on the phone, or the decorative chandelier installed in a bodega by its owner demonstrate the embellishment of the everyday. This marks the second exhibition in the Public Art Fund-JCDecaux partnership for which a series of newly-commissioned photographs will be presented on bus shelters across all five boroughs. Back and Forth Disco is Al Qasimi’s first institutional solo show in New York and is on view from January 29 through May 17, 2020.

Best known for the rich textures and saturated colors of her photographs, Al Qasimi’s distinct approach to portraiture challenges traditional notions of figuration by obscuring people’s faces in order to protect their identity. Instead, her subjects’ vitality is expressed through garments, hair styles, and poses, incorporating them into larger compositions through reflections, mirrors, and surfaces that mediate the viewer’s visual access to the individual. In East Broadway Mall, Al Qasimi documents a shopping complex in Manhattan’s Chinatown that reminds her of the architecture of malls in the Emirates. Vivid flowers foreground the landscape-like scene captured from a staircase, overlooking a shopkeeper surrounded by neon signage and merchandise.

Al Qasimi’s process is both spontaneous and deliberate. She photographs friends and strangers alike, often returning to familiar places repeatedly or recreating moments she has seen in public space in more controlled environments. Depicting neighborhood stores, barber shops, street scenes, and homes, she subtly draws out inconspicuous but expressive details in larger compositions that spark recognition within communities. In Coco, a cockatoo who resides at a curtain store in Ridgewood, Queens is paid a visit by regulars in the neighborhood. A young boy looks at the bird but his eyes are concealed by his mother’s extended arm, allowing other features – such as the woman’s bright red nails – to become the focal point.

“Al Qasimi’s photographs celebrate acts of adornment in the way people choose to decorate their businesses, homes, communities, and themselves, highlighting the idiosyncrasies and overlooked beauty of our urban environment,” says Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Katerina Stathopoulou. “The public nature of the bus shelters—and the fact that larger than life photographs are inserted into the paths of New York City commuters at eye level—has inspired Al Qasimi to approach the project in a unique way, focusing more on monolithic images that bring the inside world out.”

Bus shelters housing Al Qasimi’s work will appear in more than 18 neighborhoods, including Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Astoria, Queens, the Lower East Side, Manhattan, and Melrose, the Bronx—in many cases connecting them back to the locations in which the photographs were made. Displayed on platforms traditionally used for advertising, the works address the language of commercial media in a large, yet familiar format that New Yorkers come across every day.

This is the second exhibition in the collaboration between Public Art Fund and JCDecaux, which brings two solo exhibitions each year to 100 JCDecaux bus shelters citywide. The exhibitions create a continuously evolving platform to bring artistic voices to street level for all New Yorkers, enabling the public to encounter remarkable works of art along their daily routes by bus or on foot. The initial iterations serve as spaces to showcase the work of photographers, who have been invited to create topical new bodies of work in New York City. In August 2019, this partnership was inaugurated with Elle Pérez: from sun to sun; the collaboration between Public Art Fund and JCDecaux builds on the nonprofit’s rich history of transforming the city’s ubiquitous advertising spaces, including the seminal exhibition series Messages to the Public (1982-90), Commercial Break (2017), and Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors (2017), and it is a core program by which JCDecaux engages with its local communities.

Farah Al Qasimi: Back and Forth Disco is curated by Public Art Fund Assistant Curator Katerina Stathopoulou.