Living Room Vape
- Artist: Farah Al Qasimi
- Date: 2016
- Medium: Photograph, inkjet print on paper
- Dimensions: image: 654 × 882 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
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About this artwork
This is the "Living Room Vape" by Farah Al Qasimi. It’s a 2016 photograph, printed with inkjet on paper, that invites you to a space where nothing quite feels settled. One figure’s head disappears into a haze of vapor, another stands at the frame’s edge, turned away, leaving the viewer to wonder whose living room we’re seeing. The room itself is a mash‑up of cultures: Persian textiles lay against porcelain vases, while a European landscape painting hangs in the background, hinting at the baroque and the editorial. Al Qasimi’s eye turns the scene into a commentary on transcultural exchange, on how Gulf tastes have absorbed and reinterpreted foreign aesthetics over decades. The work is part of a series of photographs that blur the line between public and private, between the familiar and the uncanny, and it was acquired in 2022 through the Middle East North Africa Acquisitions Committee. The ambiguity of location and identity is deliberate, respecting privacy while still revealing the private worlds of its subjects.
See it in person
Living Room Vape is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
