Susan Sontag would have loved “Poltergeist,” Farah Al Qasimi’s vivid, chillingly pleasurable solo exhibition at C/O Berlin. Think Notes on Camp, UAE style: Domestic life, consumer culture, and the fantasies that connect the two offer up a road map to a no-man’s-land (pun-intended) that may, for some, elucidate a specifically feminine subjectivity in the Gulf States. Al Qasimi is casually ingenious in referencing regionally specific visual tropes and their mediation. Large photographs, a video work, and a compilation of saccharine commercial imagery pasted to the wall attest to an appetite for intimacy that somehow goes hand in hand with the vapid seduction induced by semi-luxury goods.
The majority of the pictures feature flowers, often printed or plastic. Frequent mirrored and chrome surfaces induce a visual disorientation that verges on vertigo. Al Qasimi conjures a universe where nature has been utterly eviscerated by culture (although of a decisively lowbrow variety). There is great visual intelligence at work here. While the imagery is anything but subtle, the critique of gendered consumerism and its essential threat to sanity certainly is.
Arguably the show’s most haunting work is Al Qasimi’s video Psychic Repair, 2023, which plays across three screens at the far end of the gallery. Footage jumps from shopping malls to toy dolls, overlaid with a cloying jingle and a disassociated voice-over. At one point, a girl repeats the mantra: “Failure, fear, myself. Repeat.” I watched the video more than a dozen times and felt like a four-year-old cartoon princess who had just eaten a family-size package of Twinkies. Tiara off to you, Al Qasimi.
— Sophia Powers
