Farah Al Qasimi at Cooper Cole
During the pandemic, I’ve picked up the sticky habit of glancing into people’s windows to get a glimpse at the art that hangs on their walls. The act of voyeurism is simultaneously mundane and intimate. The art, often bought en masse at a generic retailer, is something lived with every day. A bold portrait or Dada-esque sculpture often stops me in my tracks: who lives there? This involuntary impulse to peer into people’s domestic lives indicates how much I’ve missed seeing art outside the confines of my own apartment.
Thankfully, Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto gave me a healthy outlet for this habit. Despite the gallery being closed due to the lockdown in Toronto, Cooper Cole went forward with the solo show, “Lady Lady,” of photographs by Farah Al Qasimi—keeping the lights on at night so onlookers can view the show. Looking through the window at night, I felt disoriented when the mirror in a photograph didn’t reflect me standing in front of it.
The brightly lit photographs navigate the tension between public and private life, a theme made pertinent by its presentation. The images are familiar and eerie, intimate domestic scenes are made visible through the sharpness of the image where every detail is on display. As I looked through the window into these domestic scenes, the act echoed a voyeur—a not unfamiliar feeling.
"I try to build worlds in which geography doesn’t matter, and which can access psychic states that are difficult to describe with verbal language.” Al Qasimi said in an interview with SSENSE. In a world where geography is isolated to the place you live, art fairs are viewed online, and travel is regulated, the geographic-limbo of the exhibition itself takes on metaphorical potential.
Al Qasimi’s photographs are articulations of a specific kind of space—familiar aesthetically due to the well-lit commercial photography it emulates, but also unfamiliar due to its subject, the private sphere the photographs capture. Hung ontop murals of shopping centres, the two spaces converge to push the viewer into a challenging reading: What is private? What is public? How do aesthetics dictate which is which?
The layers within these two spaces (and the added element of the gallery space), echo Foucault's theory of heterotopias. Loosley, a heterotopia is a space that opens and closes, that one can pass through, and consists of multiple layers of time and history. Gardens, mirrors, hotels, and museums are all considered heterotopias by Foucault.
Having recently read Foucault’s essay, the mirrors in Al Qasimi’s exhibition stood out to me. In each reflection, there are multiple figures visible. Here, the act of grooming becomes a communal activity. The fact that one person can be reflected three times articulates the unrealness of the mirror as a physical space.
“In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror,” writes Foucault in his 1964 essay “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” “But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there,” he continued. Looking at Al Qasimi’s photographs of mirrors, and not seeing myself reflected in the hyper-realistic image, but knowing I am looking at it, creates a dissonance where I am both there and not.
The nature of looking through the wide window at Cooper Cole to view “Lady Lady,” meant my eye had to work harder than it usually does to view art. A small photograph in the corner slowly made itself out to me: a folded hand on a tiled backdrop. I wanted to get closer, to know if what I was seeing was real. But the partition of glass stopped me, reflecting an image of myself back at me.
Visit Farah Al Qasimi at Cooper Cole in Toronto, January 15 - February 13, 2021
You can follow Farah Al Qasimi on Instagram here.
