Arrival, The Third Line, Dubai

Farah Al Qasimi's Arrival uses the imagery of horror cinema to stage jinn folklore drawn from across the United Arab Emirates.

Self-published in a signed edition of 100 for Al Qasimi's third solo exhibition at The Third Line in Dubai, running September through November 2019, the softcover book gathers the photographs shown alongside her first feature-length film, the horror-comedy Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire). That film follows a fictional reality-television crew producing a segment on a Ras Al Khaimah jinn, using the format to trace the region's shift from Portuguese and British naval occupation to a national identity built around tolerance and rapid cultural change. The photographs in Arrival extend that same interest in belief, spectacle, and everyday transformation, staging domestic and public scenes as though something unseen were already in the frame.

Al Qasimi studied photography and music at Yale, and her work, held in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Guggenheim, has consistently treated the Gulf's rapid modernization as a subject for the uncanny rather than the merely documentary.