Desert Dreamscape

November 23, 2024 – November 8, 2025

Wyoming Theater Gallery

Farah Al Qasimi’s (b. Abu Dhabi, 1991) Desert Dreamscape is an immersive film experience, inviting the viewer into a fantastical scene based on her childhood bedroom. Featuring soft lighting and ambient music composed and performed by the artist, Desert Dreamscape invites meditation on nostalgia, longing, and the feeling of “home.” Engaging the viewer’s nostalgia, she encourages a shared experience of longing that reveals the fragility of our sense of place.

With a run-time of over ten hours, the film calls for slow engagement and close looking. The patient observer is rewarded with a subtle shift in lighting as the scene transitions from daytime into night and back again, simulating the passage of several days. Its relative stillness and calming soundtrack invoke the internet genre of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos meant to soothe the minds of the stressed. Visit the Art Museum to experience Desert Dreamscape in the cozy Wyoming Theater Gallery.

About the artist

Farah Al Qasimi makes photographs, films and music. Often working with large-scale vinyl imagery and a multiplicity of photographic prints and screens, she is interested in the internet and its hierarchies of information and emotion. Al Qasimi loves the complexity of storytelling and value-building in children's cartoons, and many of her video works include primary narrators who are anthropomorphized. Through a highly collaborative practice, she has worked with hand-sewn puppets, falcons, African Land Snails, exorcists, and most recently, a Jack Sparrow impersonator. Her work is in the collections of MoMA New York, Tate Modern, Guggenheim New York and Abu Dhabi, and she has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Delfina Foundation in London, and the Chinati Foundation in Marfa.

Film still from "Desert Dreamscape"

To learn more about Al Qasimi's work, visit her website. Farah Al Qasimi, Desert Dreamscape, 2024. Commissioned by Hyundai Artlab at Hyundai Motor Company © Farah Al Qasimi. Learn more about Al Qasimi's Digital Commission on Hyundai Artlab's website.

Image: Farah Al Qasimi, film still Desert Dreamscape, 2024, courtesy of the artist and Hyundai Artlab at Hyundai Motor Company © Farah Al Qasimi.

Funded through the generosity of the Susan Moldenhauer FUNd for Contemporary Art, the Patricia R. Guthrie Special Exhibitions Gallery Endowment, WE Soda, and By Western Hands.

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