BEVERLY HILLS, CA.- François Ghebaly presents 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.
A defining voice of her generation of photographers, Farah Al Qasimi has built a practice that captures the dizzying relationship between material culture, globalized media, and contemporary society. A photographer, performer, musician, and video artist, Al Qasimi presents her work in vibrant and layered installations that speak to the collision of images in real and online spaces. Examining structures of power, gender, (post)coloniality, and consumer aesthetics in an interconnected world, her work often conveys an uncanny geography, both specific and placeless.
Al Qasimi (b. 1991, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; works in Abu Dhabi and Brooklyn) studied photography and music at Yale University in 2012 and received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2017. Recent solo presentations include SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah; Defina Foundation, London; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, AUS; C/O Berlin, Germany; Delfina Foundation, London; Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, Canada; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; the Abu Dhabi Cultural Foundation, UAE; Esker Foundation, Calgary, Canada; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Houston Center for Photography; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge.
Al Qasimi’s work is widely collected in public museums, including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MoMa PS1, New York; Tate Modern, London; Guggenheim New York and Abu Dhabi; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Jameel, Dubai; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The Whitney Museum of American Art will be presenting Farah Al Qasimi: TAILSPIN on January 30, 2027.
