Moving Bodies/Theorizing Up

Essay for Farah Al-Qasimi’s Um Al-Naar (2019)

The first time I stumbled on Farah Al-Qasimi’s work, I was struck by her ability to invoke the human body where it was absent. In Sunset Circus, a series of photographs of coastal towns across the US, Farah captured a variety of everyday spaces: an unremarkable street, a nondescript forest, a laundromat advertising laundry service. The images almost beckoned one to imagine what kind of bodies might inhabit these spaces and what they would do. I read it as a clever “reverse orientalism” of sorts, one that makes you aware of the politics of representation without necessarily rendering it the subject of the work. Her future projects continued to build on these themes where she evolves from absent bodies to bodies that are hiding, hidden, peeking, or partial.

When I met her in 2016 she had been commissioned to produce a work as part of a series on “Labor” at Al-Serkal. In Its Not Easy Being Seen Farah refashions the body as a canvas and uses her studio as a place to perform and critique notions of gendered domestic labor (preparing food, cleaning surfaces, etc.). The work is shown outdoors on a large advertising billboard that provokes many of those who walk past it, men, women, and children of various ages to react to it as if it were a theatrical backdrop: some dance, some take pictures, and some take videos of passersby. Her work moves us beyond clichéd ideas about labor and the vexed relationship of women’s bodies to it, to a more performative space in which repetition, scale, and humor solicits a bodily engagement from the audience. In More Good News (2017), she shifts her focus to men’s bodies, we witness them in military garb or white kandoras in various poses, mostly in indoor/ private spaces. The emotional tenor of much of this work is about vulnerability and the absence of the masculine ideal. Far from flattening narratives about oppressive Arab men, these images evoke the complex ways in which men’s bodies are shaped by the intersections of political, ethnic, religious, and economic power.

In her debut short film, Um Al Naar, Farah continues her exploration of the body in new and provocative ways. The film is a mock documentary on a fictional reality television channel called “Future Tv” in which producers interview a mythical Jinn character named Um Al Naar about her experiences in Ras Al-Khaima. The Jinn is covered in layers of floral cloth and no part of her body is visible. Only a rudimentary face is sewn on the front and she holds a glass of tea as she chats casually to the audience. In this comic combination of “sesame street” meets “state sponsored documentary,” we come to hear Um Al Naar’s rendition of the transnational history of RAK and her complex sense of belonging to it. The footage is full of moving bodies: dancing bodies, bodies inhabited by Jinn, bodies jerking through exorcism, bodies in a living room dancing to the beat of a makeshift drum, and even “M3alaya” a provocative dance with a long history in the region that is considered taboo by many today and even outlawed in some places. While some of these bodies inhabit the UAE, many others are in neighboring countries: Saudi, Oman, Jordan and others. The one thing that becomes clear is that Um Al Naar loves to dance (as we are told, followed by three exclamation marks to make it clear) despite the taboos and what she sees as the more recent selective rejection of aspects of RAK’s history.   Punctuated by the regular popping up of the logo of “Future Tv” a fluorescent globe with protruding lips giving us a thumbs up or by words such as “Reality Cam”, we are constantly reminded of the fictional nature of this account. In this film, all the binaries are deconstructed: Um Al Naar’s voice is a man’s voice. Baba Ali, a Jinn exorcist, is in fact a woman. Many of the dancing/gyrating bodies are gender ambiguous. The boundaries between fact/fiction, old/new, caged/free, dirty/clean, human/inhuman, pleasure/pain are questioned throughout the film. The accompanying exhibition photographs are about the spaces occupied by the bodies in the film: we see traces of the body in a dripping soap bar, a body peeking behind a shower, and the tip of a very sharp knife delivering a watermelon slice to a mouth that receives it with great pleasure.

I see this work, in many ways, as multi-vocal: it is attempting to speak to multiple audiences and make critical interventions in different spaces. Accordingly, it resonates with calls to theorize the Gulf not simply as an extreme case of an existing theoretical framework but to theorize it from the ground-up to shed new light on what we know about elsewhere. In this way, one can read this work as responding to Neha Vora’s call to de-exceptionalize the Gulf in ways that do not simply confirm “what we already know.” Farah is among a group of cultural producers and writers who write in formal institutional spaces, self-curated and informal spaces, and in digital spaces that sometimes disappear: Ahmad Makia’s writing on Gulf sexualities, Rana Al-Mutawa’s research on authenticity, Alaa Edris’s exploration of spaces are some examples of this growing community. They are invested in creating a new vernacular for what it means to be from a place, to speak for it, against it, and with it simultaneously. Perhaps what we are left with is an invitation to theorize up, together, and, of course.. to dance. 

Commissioned essay for the exhibition catalogue Arrival:

https://view.publitas.com/thethirdline/farah-al-qasimi-arrival/page/6-7

To cite please use:

Aldabbagh, May (2019). Moving Bodies/Theorizing up. Published for the exhibition Arrival at Third Line Gallery, Dubai: Publitas.