Farah Al Qasimi Turns Jump-Rope Rhymes and Punk Songs Into Music Videos at SCAD

The three films in Farah Al Qasimi’s new show are each about the length of a song, and she wrote them herself. The photographer and musician’s Psychic Repair, open now at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, treats the supernatural as a way to look at the unseen forces in daily life, from consumerism to the internet. Al Qasimi told Dazed:

They’re almost like music videos,

Farah Al Qasimi, Dazed

She adds: “Like a teenage girl writing lyrics in a notebook.” SCAD says the videos turn jump-rope rhymes, spoken poetry and punk rock songs into “prophetic mantras.” In one, she rebuilt her teenage bedroom and plays the monster that lives under the bed.

A haunted doll and a music-video bedroom

The show takes its name from one of the videos, about a plastic doll that is thrown out, ends up in a landfill and can’t decompose. She comes back to haunt her former owners. Al Qasimi found the doll at the Emirati equivalent of a dollar store in Abu Dhabi, and she says the film grew out of thinking about plastic and haunting: Victorian haunted dolls were made of organic fabrics, but plastic only exists after so much industrial mediation. She had already written the song in the film before the doll turned up.

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The photographs are loud. Highly saturated images exploring rituals of self-presentation are layered in a style SCAD compares to early internet pop-up ads and department-store displays, and many are interior portraits of friends made in New York and the Emirates. The show also fills the museum’s façade vitrines as well as an interior gallery.

Why it matters

Al Qasimi, born in Abu Dhabi in 1991, works across photography, film and music, and her pieces are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern and the Guggenheim in New York and Abu Dhabi. Her collaborators over the years have included hand-sewn puppets, falcons, African land snails, exorcists and, most recently, a Jack Sparrow impersonator, SCAD notes. She isn’t the only photographer scoring her own images: Wolfgang Tillmans plays the kalimba on a video in his Los Angeles show.

Dazed frames the whole show around one question: what do you believe in that you have no conclusive evidence for? For a photographer with roots in street photography and documentary storytelling, Al Qasimi says, the supernatural is a problem for the camera.

You can’t photograph a ghost.

Farah Al Qasimi, Dazed

Psychic Repair runs through June 7. It was organized by SCAD Museum of Art associate curator Brittany Richmond as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2026.

Added to the High Grailed archive on October 12, 2026.