In ‘Psychic Repair’, the artist examines how digital culture, consumer spectacle and personal memory shape contemporary life, reflecting on photography’s shifting role in an age of surveillance, self-performance and endless image circulation.
23 June 2026
At the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, Farah Al Qasimi’s exhibition ‘Psychic Repair’ brought together photography, sound and installation to explore the emotional and psychological conditions of the present. Moving between bedrooms, marketplaces, advertisements and digital spaces, the exhibition considered how intimacy is increasingly shaped by algorithmic systems, and how imagination remains a vital tool for navigating contemporary life. Al Qasimi reflects on photography after surveillance, the politics of self-presentation, the role of contradiction, and how repair begins with asking better questions.
‘Psychic Repair’ explores the hidden forces that shape how we live today, from beauty culture to online life to inherited beliefs. How do you use photography to reveal these forces while still keeping their complexity and mystery?
Farah Al Qasimi: I think people are increasingly distrustful of photography because it’s been adapted to surveil, to flatten and transmit identity about individuals to governments or corporations. Al Qasimi reflects on photography after surveillance, the politics of self-presentation, the role of contradiction, and how repair begins with asking better questions. With this show, I was primarily concerned with how the sacred space of a bedroom becomes infiltrated by algorithmic presence, so I was photographing a lot of people being hidden or camouflaged in their surroundings.
In the exhibition, homes, shopping spaces, and internet aesthetics seem to blend together. What interests you about the overlap between intimacy and spectacle in contemporary life?
The concept of spectacle is changing in scale – it’s all about how to hold someone’s attention in an image-saturated world, and many of those images exist on small, personal screens. In the installation, I like to build something additive out of lots of little parts, and to play with shifting scale to acknowledge the image languages of billboards and in-app advertisements.
Your photographs often feel dreamlike or surreal. In ‘Psychic Repair’, fantasy seems less like an escape and more like part of reality itself. Do you see imagination as a form of survival, resistance, or something more uncertain?
Absolutely. It was a form of survival for me in my childhood, as an obsessive daydreamer. Everybody feels the call to transcend or disconnect from their environment at some point, and imagination is necessary to name the alternative.
In the photographs, I try to point to these moments of transcendence in regular life, like a mural of an island destination, or a Snapchat filter, or an item of shapewear – all things that speak to our desire to access difference NOW.
The exhibition draws from your experiences growing up in the UAE and living in the United States, but the work does not feel strictly autobiographical. How do you balance personal memory with the way audiences read cultural identity?
I do feel like sometimes, zooming in is the way to be more general. You can access the global with the hyper-local, because what you’re looking at is human. In a pragmatic way, that means photographing in these really personal, intimate spaces and then showing them next to a photograph of a busy marketplace.
Rituals of self-presentation appear throughout your work, from makeup and fashion to posing and performance. What do these rituals reveal about identity in the age of social media?
Identity is more and more something outside of ourselves – a projection rather than an interiority. A few years ago, there was a “trend” on TikTok that walked users through how to use their front-facing cameras to see how other people viewed them. We’re becoming detrimentally self-conscious and demanding a clean absolutism of representation that just isn’t natural – we should be able to be messy, moving.
Sound plays an important role in ‘Psychic Repair’, creating a mood that feels both playful and unsettling. What does sound allow you to express that photography alone cannot?
It’s just entirely different. It accesses a different emotional register. Sometimes people connect with the rhythm, and it becomes a bodily response. Looking feels slower somehow. Things unfold over time; your perception isn’t reliant on a split second.
Your work often brings together humour and anxiety, tenderness and absurdity. Do you think contradiction is necessary to represent contemporary life, especially online life?
Of course. People are self-contradictory, layered and complicated. My work is about people, so it should reflect that.
The title ‘Psychic Repair’ suggests healing, but the exhibition seems more interested in exposing emotional and social fractures than fixing them. What does “repair” mean to you today?
I think the first step to repair is acknowledging that there is a problem. I’m not offering any answers or diagnoses, but I’m trying to describe the questions with greater clarity.
This exhibition was on view at the SCAD Museum of Art in Georgia from 30 January to 7 June 2026.
