Glitches, Ghosts, and Going Off Script: with Farah Al Qasimi and Martine Syms

Farah Al Qasimi and Martine Syms have built their practices on the razor’s edge between the absurd and the deeply personal. Al Qasimi (with her dreamlike installations, music, and transcendent, often hallucinatory imagery) and Syms (whose multimedia practice dissects contemporary culture with biting wit) find common ground in their love for the uncanny and refusal to play by the rules. Coming together for the first time, the two friends unravel the obsessions, contradictions, and surreal humour that shapes their work and the blurring boundaries between public and private in the digital age. Spanning the world of AI consciousness, art criticism, daydreams, the supernatural, and everything in between, their exchange is a freewheeling dive into the minds of two artists navigating the chaos of modern life with curiosity and, of course, a touch of the otherworldly.

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01 | Order Here

How did you two meet?

Farah: My God, how did we meet?

Martine: I’m not sure because I learned of your work by seeing it and being a fan, but then I also realised we had all these mutual friends. I want to say I just reached out because I knew you were friends with Diamond, and I’m very much a cold caller.

Farah: I am, too, and I was also a fan before we met.

What kinds of similarities and differences do you both have in your work?

Farah: I feel like you’re excellent, Martine, at doing everythingness. You’re really good at the work being all-encompassing, but also having it be palpably linked to what it feels like to be alive right now, you know? And I think that’s something I try to do in installations with still images. When I look at how your work is installed – I saw your work [Present Goo] in London at Sadie Coles, where you had the TikTok of yourself and then ring-cam footage of yourself walking out of the car, and I feel like it’s linked to the organic experience of being somebody who’s obsessed with scrolling. I think many people try to make work that feels contemporary in that way where it’s like, okay, we know that there’s an attention crisis. We know we’re being completely duped by TikTok, by companies who know attention is currency, but I feel like you do it in a way that’s really engaging and really human, and implicates yourself. You become the filter that everything runs through; that’s the most obvious similarity for me.

Martine: Similarly, in our interest in (I hate to call it this) street photography because it feels weird, but I carry my camera and shoot in that way. I think your way of shooting is both collecting footage and then having the best of both worlds, the non-fiction and fiction, the stuff you constructed and set up, and the things you’re coming across—and how to blend those so they do have a quality of life and feel real in that way. Also, in our sense of humour, and boldness in filmmaking; I think something that’s really important to me is breaking all the rules of conventional cinema that I learned in film school. So, I’m always drawn to people who are using narrative differently and using it in a way that is really expansive. Whether that be through composition – which is one thing I love about Farah’s work – or colour, and moving us through that frame, editing, and kind of also the everythingness, like you said, from doing the music to having an animation, there’s a kind of continuity.

Farah: Another important thing, too, is that we’re both into
the supernatural.

Martine: Yes—ghosts, spirits, jinn, exorcisms, possession.

How do you think the way we think about the supernatural changes today with tech and this notion of the disembodied machine?

Martine: I went to see this play Doomers and it’s about an AI founder who jumped an ethical barrier, and they’re having a meeting and trying to fire him. It’s kind of like a thinly veiled version of OpenAI, where they fired and then rehired their CEO. I was part of an AI think tank a few years ago, and a lot of the conversations that were in the play were giving me PTSD. I personally think that technology has its own consciousness, and I don’t mean that it’s sentient, nor do I mean that it’s an entity or something like that. I think the closest comparison would be to animism there’s a different consciousness that also affects ours.

Farah: I don’t know if I’ve necessarily made that link before, probably because I haven’t considered technology as sentient. But I always think of how, for me, the link is with people’s fears being tied or projected onto what they can’t see or what they don’t understand. The example I immediately thought of was Poltergeist—the original one, not any of the remakes. When the little girl gets sucked into the TV, which is also the portal for the ghost world, and then that iconic image from the poster with a hand sticking up against it from the inside.

You both use humour and satire exceptionally well, and it’s very refreshing. What role, if any, does satire play in your work?

Farah: I try to make humour out of things that are difficult, but not to be cynical. I think a good example for me is how I found The African Desperate deeply funny, but it also pained me. For example, [lead character] Palace’s final critique encapsulated everything I went through in grad school to the point that A.L.Steiner was one of my critics. She’s great, and she was really good at dissipating some of the tension. I was in grad school at the time that Trump was inaugurated the first time around, when ISIS was really active and there were a lot of terror attacks in Paris and across Europe. There was this looming fear that there was going to be another 9/11, so people were not even masking their anti-Arab sentiments, and it was coming up in crits. I had one crit of a passport-style photo that I took of an undergrad who was from Iran, wearing her hijab against a floral backdrop.

We had an all-white panel that entire semester and one of them started comparing her to young girls running away to join ISIS. It just devolved from there, with another critic saying something and trying to sort of be like, “Why is everything all about race?” before making a very offensive remark at a Black student. If you had made a Muppet show episode about what not to do, that would be the example. All of that to say, it was not funny at the time, but when I was watching The African Desperate, I thought, this is funny. Because it’s true, you know? It taps into that fringe where you’re seeing people step over themselves in a situation where they do not know how to talk. They just don’t know, and that’s funny because it’s a keen observation of how people act when they don’t know how to act.

Martine: Thank you. First of all, I’m sorry you had to go through that. I also had it in similar institutions, but I try not to be cynical either. I do find a lot just very funny in my observations, and I’m always observing what’s going on. But I think people not knowing how to talk about things or communicate is a running theme in a lot of my work—like being misread or having malapropism or Freudian slips, all these kinds of things. A joke I used to make around the time that I was in grad school, which was also during Trump’s first presidency, was if somebody said BIPOC, I would be like, “What did you call me?” And they’d just be like, “Wait, I thought it was a good word.”

Farah: Have you seen that segment from Jimmy Fallon when he’s introducing RuPaul, and it’s like, “Now we have RuPaul, blah blah blah drag queen.” And then Ru goes, “Drag queen!? I am the QUEEN of drag!” But at that moment, she knew exactly what she was doing. Jimmy’s face, just for a second, was like: Oh my god, this is it; I’m about to get cancelled. I’m curious, Martine, do you remember the last time you laughed so hard that you cried, or like belly laughed?

Martine: I’m trying to think because it happens often. Well, I was actually belly laughing at your birthday party, but for reasons I can’t say on the record.

Farah: You can tell me after.

Martine: But I don’t know, probably some meme. I’m always cackling at a meme. A friend of mine texted me something I’ve been joking about. Well, it’s not a joke actually, but adding findom to a career, and the text was: “I need some head and a raise.” That made me laugh because I also need that.

Onto the subject of America, something we’ve been doing in this issue is tearing apart this idea of Americana. How do you both play or respond to it and its iconography, if at all?

Farah: A lot of my family are immigrants; they’ve been here since the 50s. My uncle is a bald, stern-looking Lebanese man who wears Versace shirts and owns a bodega. So, that’s maybe not American, but very New York because the city has basically kept going by immigrants like him. I do think it’s a weird moment now because I feel like everybody culturally is trying to redefine Americanism, especially with this kind of iconography of the cowboy South making its way back into the mainstream.

Martine: America’s a crazy place, and that’s part of what I like about it. I feel very American, but I’m also extremely global. I’ve travelled extensively, which I think a lot of Americans don’t have the opportunity to do. I think a lot about what Black American culture is because I think it’s a culture within many expressions and experiences of Blackness. I also think a lot about quote–unquote “immigrants”—everyone is a f*cking immigrant in the United States. I think there has been a lot of erasure of people that were actually here. I do feel like embracing all those contradictions is key to Americana for me. Some of the work, or misreading [in my work], is because of those. I’ll give one example that I think sums it all up for me: I used to teach at a college, and they had this guide for international students and, to me, the funniest line in the guide was: “If someone says, let’s get lunch, they don’t necessarily mean you’re going to get lunch.” I thought it was so funny because it’s basically saying that Americans lie, that it’s a big part of our culture to lie. Americans are like “war on drugs”, meanwhile there’s meth heads everywhere, you know? Every single thing about America is a projection of a lie.

Something about both of your works is that they tend to be dreamy and surreal, almost uncanny and absurd, but also bound to the real in quite interesting ways. They’re like daydreams. What has been in your daydreams recently?

Farah: Oh, that’s easy: moving to a farm in the middle of nowhere, where I adopt all the sick and injured animals that nobody wants, and just like… wearing muumuus and overalls and hanging out with all the animals.

Martine: Mine is the opposite. It’s being dripped in diamonds. I want to be iced the f*ck out. I want like, ching ching ching, earrings, necklaces, bracelets. That’s what I’ve been imagining myself, in a sweatsuit, like a hoodie, and then just being blinged out in the most trash house outfit, and then, like, being iced out.

Farah: That would be a good magazine cover like house shoes, house dress, and then full diamonds on top. Well, the thing is, Martine, you can wear the outfit on the farm.

Martine: You’re right, it doesn’t preclude the farm.

Farah: I want to asterisk that I’m not a horse girl, and I’ve never been a horse girl. I respect horses, but I’m also scared of them. I tried riding one once, it was terrifying.

I want to bring it more to the topic of art institutions a little bit, as that’s something you, Martine, do really well. Recently, there’s been this infamous, quite ridiculous article by Dean Kissick about how politics has killed contemporary art…

Farah: No comment.

Martine: Boooooringggg.

Farah: Yeah, boring as hell. My friend Ajay actually wrote a response to it, and I did read that. But after the first paragraph, I gave up really paying attention because I couldn’t believe this man was using his mom’s tragic accident to hook us into an article about why the art world supposedly sucks now.

Martine: I just find it an extremely boring, transparent ploy to make money in this new far-right economy sponsored by Peter Thiel. You know someone being like: “Let me get in while I can.” I find it to be the dullest, most common thing ever. I didn’t read it, and I won’t be reading it.

Don’t read it. It’s a waste of your time. You mentioned your living room, and it brings up an interesting point about private space in a post-internet context. Do you think there is almost this collapse between private and public space today? And if there’s an element of constant performance in this, if so, how might your work respond to it?

Martine: This is related to a question I wanted to ask Farah, which was about directing and how you direct your subjects and get the imagery, both in video and photography. I was kind of curious because it does feel like it blends up public and private, including your approach as a director, even if you don’t use that term.

Farah: It’s funny, I’ve never used that term because I think in the work that I’ve done so far, I’ve put all the pieces together, but I haven’t really thought about what I wanted from people in those moments. I’m talking specifically about film work and less about photographs. When I’m directing in photographs, it’s usually pretty minimal. I think with the film work that I’ve done, I’ve somehow engineered my process to, until now, fit comfortably in a zone where I don’t have to delegate. I think I’m now trying to step out of that and into a zone where I feel really uncomfortable. I’ve been listening to all these audiobooks this last summer about directing, and they’re just questions that I never thought about because I didn’t go to film school. And I’ve never been part of a film set. I feel like I’m learning backwards and want to understand the human element more; I’m starting with this next film I’m working on. It’s really beginning as a documentary – very observational and dialogue driven – but eventually, I want to turn it into something else. I want to take my time with it to try and understand the characters that I’m building and the world they belong to. It’s very much a listening and learning period right now. What about you? You’ve worked in long-form narrative, and you’ve also made shorter films, but how fleshed out is your process before you approach something shorter?

Martine: I really try to combine film and artistic processes, so even on long-form and bigger productions, I try to be like: “We’re doing an art project.” I like working with DPs and adding a technical aspect to it, as well as experimentation—that’s where a lot of the process is for me. And acting, I think it’s such a cool craft. The first time I worked with actors was in 2016, and it changed my dialogue so much. They add all these parts: what they think and their life experience, and it becomes very collaborative in that way. I like what it brings out of my text. I think it’s hard to practice directing because it takes so much to put a shoot together, so I’ve enjoyed being in people’s stuff a lot. At some point, I had this grant, and I was in acting school, taking opera and voice lessons, but it was really from watching other people direct that the experience was invaluable. I realised how people were thinking about it and how you may have to say something to get what you want. I think that’s a part of film I really like.

Farah: That’s interesting because I hadn’t considered it before. I feel like that is a great way to learn, to be part of someone else’s team and see how everything runs. The first time that I ever had a budget to make a film, I was making my set list and doing everything at once, and it was too much. Even though I prefer just me and a handycam, it creates this extra layer of meaning when, suddenly, I’m implied as an author in a way that I don’t always want to be. Whereas if you’re just shooting all this raw footage that’s really well made, it creates a total blank slate, which isn’t always what you want.

Martine: That’s what I was going to say—it’s objective. That tension is super interesting to me.

Farah: I think that’s a good place to end because it goes back to our first question about what our similarities are, which is being able to move these two different ways of making things that are both extremely casual and also really thought out, and making them fit into one universe as opposed to saying “my work is this” or “my work is that”. But truly, the work is the filter; it’s not what you see on the walls or in the film. It’s how it’s put together.

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 01 | Order Here