In Psychic Repair, photographer and musician Farah Al Qasimi (b. 1991, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates) activates the SCAD Museum of Art’s façade vitrines and an interior gallery through the play of scale and dimensionality. Informed by her girlhood in the UAE and experiences of womanhood in the U.S., Al Qasimi produces highly saturated images that explore rituals of self-presentation and their ties to identity, memory, and belief formation. Across photographic installations and music videos, she layers these images in a style reminiscent of early internet pop-up ads and department store displays, shifting fluidly between analog and digital modes. Patterns, textures, and shadows become conduits for fantasy and phantasm in her documentary photographs, while her music videos transform jump-rope rhymes, spoken poetry, and punk rock songs into prophetic mantras. Throughout the exhibition, the supernatural operates as a metaphor for the unseen, transient forces of contemporary beauty and fashion culture that shape how we see, feel, and behave.
Press release from SCAD
Image: Installation view from Farah Al Qasimi’s Psychic Repair at SCAD Museum of Art, 2026. Image courtesy of SCAD Museum of Art
