The three films in Farah Al Qasimi’s latest show at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Psychic Repair, are the length of songs. The photographer and musician, who’s known for interrogating the hierarchies of information and emotion inherent in the internet, wrote them herself. “They’re almost like music videos,” she says. “Like a teenage girl writing lyrics in a notebook.” The videos transform jump-rope rhymes, spoken poetry and punk rock songs into prophetic mantras. In one, Qasimi even replicated her teenage bedroom and performed as the monster that lives under the bed.

In Psychic Repair, which runs until June 7, Qasimi faces the monsters under the bed and the ghosts in her closet head-on. Throughout the exhibition, highly saturated images that explore rituals of self-presentation are layered in a style reminiscent of early internet pop-up ads and department store displays. Informed by both her girlhood in the United Arab Emirates and adulthood in the US, Qasimi uses the supernatural to gain an understanding of how the people around her see the world. It operates as a metaphor for the unseen forces at play in daily life. Patterns, shadows and materials serve their purpose as conduits for fantasy and phantasm. It all comes down to this question: what do you believe in that you have no conclusive evidence for? 

I spoke to Qasimi early this month, while she was in Bushwick. It was a few days before her 35th birthday, and she was waiting for the black ice to melt. Below, she shares her supernatural experiences from childhood, why she wants to explore the “slippery idea of truth”, and what constitutes a modern-day haunting. 

Tell me about the name, Psychic Repair. Why did you want to explore the supernatural?

Farah Al Qasimi: I’ve always been interested in the supernatural. It’s fascinating because it really shows you how different people’s belief systems are. There are parts of my family who are like, ‘Of course ghosts aren’t real, that’s silly’. Other members are like, ‘Yes, they are real, and I survived an attempted possession.’ We’re all Muslim, so we all practice the same faith fairly similarly. As a child, when you are starting to form beliefs about the world, the supernatural is one of the first avenues where you notice these completely differing beliefs and convictions from adults. That central question of what is true and what is someone’s imagining carried into adulthood for me. The more I think about the supernatural, the more I feel like it’s not just this ghostly realm. It’s some form of power that we cannot physically see. As a child of the internet, that felt like the first manifestation of some sort of invisible presence that we all felt. 

The exhibition was informed by your own experiences of girlhood. How supernatural were you as a child, and how has it evolved over time?

Farah Al Qasimi: I had a healthy fear of the supernatural as a child. In school, and before the internet, our vernacular experience of the supernatural was through myths like Bloody Mary. I think every culture, every school, every group of kids had their own version of that. I remember trying an Ouija board with two friends of mine when I was in the fourth grade, and we were convinced that something was happening. But you don’t really know – it’s an unnamed source of energy that comes from us all together, believing in something so resolutely that it is happening. It’s similar to astrology. Some people think it’s absolute garbage, but I want to understand where people put themselves on the spectrum when there’s a perceived lack of empirical evidence for something.

Do you think knowing people’s relationship to the supernatural helps you understand them a little better? 

Farah Al Qasimi: A little bit. For a lot of people, some form of spiritualism or belief in something outside of themselves is a north star. For others, humanity is that. This idea of evidence is why I am so interested in the supernatural. As a photographer, it’s something I could never react to photographically. You can’t photograph a ghost. So, how do you bring into focus the failure of the camera to be an agent of proof and truth-telling? It’s become an important analogy for me as somebody who has roots in street photography and documentary-style storytelling to challenge what the medium does with this kind of slippery idea of truth.

The show notes in Psychic Repair mention how the supernatural operates as a metaphor for the unseen, transient forces of contemporary beauty and fashion culture. Could you tell me more about the link there?

Farah Al Qasimi: I was thinking more broadly about consumerism. The show is named after one of the videos in it, about a plastic doll who gets discarded quickly and ends up in a landfill, but can’t disintegrate. She comes back to haunt her previous owners. The idea behind the film comes from thinking about metaphysicality and the porousness of different materials. When we think about haunted dolls, we usually think about Victorian dolls. But those were made from organic fabrics that come from the earth without any intervention. Now, you have plastic that can only exist after all of this mediation that takes it so far away from its original form. Everybody knows that the world is being completely overtaken by plastic garbage. So how do these newer materials relate to the concept of haunting? 

I want to know more about the doll. Who is she?

Farah Al Qasimi: I found her at the Emirati equivalent of a Dollar Store. Abu Dhabi is turning into more of a pedestrian city than it was when I grew up there. I go on these really long evening walks, and sometimes I’ll see something in a window, and I’ll go into a shop. I also collect mechanical toys. Part of what’s freaky about them is that they look haunted because they move on their own. There are so many famous haunted doll movies because they are often such poor simulations and caricatures of human likeness. That uncanny shivery feeling is already there. So I let her wander around the kitchen in the dark. I had already written the song in the film, but she seemed like the perfect agent.

How are the photos in conversation with the films?

Farah Al Qasimi: When I make photographs, which is really kind of the central process to all of my different ways of working in my practice, there are a set of things that I always want to return to. The simplest version is that I like to make photographs of my friends. I work between New York and the Emirates; I’m from both places. So it’s natural that my work so far has mostly been in those places. With a lot of interior portraits or domestic portraits, there is this sense that the person is hiding from something. The photographs engage that anxiety of being seen and wanting to turn away.

Why do you think people are craving the supernatural right now?

Farah Al Qasimi: Part of the reason why people are looking for this additional kind of comfort that they might not be able to find in a church or a mosque is that there is a justified complete loss of faith for humanity and what it’s meant to stand for. Multiple genocides are unfolding on the internet in front of our very eyes. In the US, we’re seeing complete brutality by ICE, who are agents of chaos. It’s natural to want some affirmation that somehow, somewhere in all of this, there is still something to be preserved. That there is something worth pulling from the rubble. For me, in moments where I feel that way, I turn to people who are older, who lived through the Cold War or just have seen the different cycles of violence. 

We spoke earlier about girlhood. What parts of the exhibition pull from your experience of womanhood in the US specifically?

Farah Al Qasimi: Now, as someone who is in my mid-thirties, I look back at the rage that I felt when I was in my early mid-teens and how it was this really potent combination of internal narcissistic rage that any young person feels, combined with a deep sense of concern about the state of the world. I mean, 9/11 happened when I was 10. I was surrounded by the genesis of all of the language, all of the scaffolding of language that enabled the US to carry out so many egregious acts of terror against Iraq and the Arab world. In seeing that, and being suddenly aware of the fact that everything I learned about justice was not reflected in the world at large, there was a lot of anger. I grew up in a place that doesn’t have the history of external public protest in the way that the US does, so seeing young people go outside of themselves and protest ICE or organise school walkouts is so brave and punk rock. That’s where hope lives.

Farah Al Qasimi’s Psychic Repair is running at SCAD until 7 June 2026.