Farah Al Qasimi’s Public Art Fund commission “Back and Forth Disco”—which opened in January and places seventeen photographs across one hundred New York bus shelter light boxes—has acquired an unforeseen resonance, restoring serendipity to a metropolis under lockdown. Many of these images, most flash-lit and tartly hued, concern the city’s commerce, especially the commerce that occurs among immigrants. A pearlescent chandelier in a Yemeni-owned bodega; an Indian wedding garland of faux flowers, tied around a parked car’s rearview mirror: Al Qasimi’s eye locates and enlarges the oblique, beguiling minutiae of ordinary life.
