Farah Al Qasimi and Hamza Walker are both known for approaching questions of identity with a non-conformist energy that can be as playful as it is uncompromising. A medalist in the Emerging Artist category of the Art Basel Awards, in Al Qasimi’s films, music, and photography, daily life in Saudi Arabia and America becomes a dizzying hall of mirrors, be it the confused surfaces of bodies and domestic habitats encased in clashing floral fabrics, or the micro-wonderlands of reflective screens, not least the phones transmitting globalized consumer culture. As Director of the non-profit art space, The Brick in Los Angeles, and a medalist in the Museums and Institutions category of the awards, over the past decade, Walker has spearheaded a roster of exhibitions that challenge hierarchies and assumptions, including the recent ‘MONUMENTS,’ which offset contemporary art with decommissioned Confederate-era statues. Here the artist and curator explore their common ground.

Farah Al Qasimi: Hamza, you grew up in the punk and hardcore scene. How do you scale up and do big things without selling out or losing that kind of ethos?

Hamza Walker: I would think about it more in degrees of sublimation than in terms of scale. People say punk is about anger and I say, ‘no, punk puts a real premium on explicitness.’ Say what you mean, and say it mean. Recently I worked with Kara Walker whose sculpture, Unmanned Drone (2023), was included in ‘MONUMENTS’ (2025) at The Brick this year; it’s a study in a sublimation of intergenerational, accumulative, collective anger that I would say transcends punk.

I’m as much a child of postmodernism as of punk. But that’s postmodernism 1.0. And when I think about the translation of your fascination with SpongeBob in your own work, you’re postmodernism 2.0.

FAQ: SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-) is a survivor from an era of cartoons that were made with both children and adults in mind. It still holds up. It’s so funny; it’s about being kind and genuine, but it doesn’t feel like preaching. So much of my work is about copies or mistranslations of things. SpongeBob and Minions are two of the characters to be most reproduced in an unofficial manner, because they’re such easy shapes to draw. I have a big collection of bootleg SpongeBob ephemera.

HW: Still life, landscape, portraiture, things like stage photography versus the document – it’s not that your photography disavows or runs away from any of those things, it just throws them all into a blender. Could you talk about being from postmodernism 2.0?

FAQ: Photography really benefited from those categories in the 1990s, when so many people were playing with staging. I think we’re entering a new era in which the mechanics of an image are questioned in a different way. But ultimately, if we’re talking about art, there’s a freedom when we’re released from the demands of truth. The question about genre feels like an old one now. The proliferation of photographs is a given, I’m more interested in how we weed things out, what kind of meaning we pull from the muck.

HW: I feel like ours is a very garish moment, in terms of screen culture. I think about the Persian Gulf states as a really particular and perhaps better vantage point from which to diagnose this moment in some way. When you think about Fredric Jameson [writing Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)] going to the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, as it exemplifies postmodernism, that sounds so quaint compared to hotels in the Persian Gulf states now. The issue of where you’re from or how you position yourself as a cosmopolitan figure, is also part of that condition of postmodernism.

FAQ: More than growing up in the Gulf in the 1990s, I’m a product of whiplash from living between the United States (my mother’s family having immigrated there from Lebanon), and Abu Dhabi (by way of Ras Al Khaimah). When I was in grad school, I was fascinated by the language of Western identity politics. I heard people all over the world use terms like ‘person of color.’ A person of what color, you know?

HW: Who’s colorless?

FAQ: Who’s colorless?!

HW: No matter how garish or how heterogeneous the codes are in your photographs, I’d say that you are a formalist.

FAQ: I think about form and surface a lot. It’s the key to unlocking everything else that’s embedded within the work. I prefer dealing with the world itself, when there’s as little filtering as possible between my surroundings and how they’re being rendered through a camera. The information is already there.

I photograph the architecture of the Gulf because so much of it came to fruition during postmodernism, with a lot of buildings that were just too slick. Then there was a weird pause to catch up with what the rest of the world was doing. But that earnest desire to belong to a specific aesthetic or world of ‘taste’ is important to me. The first time I ever went to Miami, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m in Abu Dhabi in 1996.’ I feel that about LA sometimes: The way the city is laid out and the way it weathers, how things smell on certain blocks, or the specific way that the sun bleaches paint that is so familiar to me.

I have a question about your radio station days. Do you feel like you are bringing some of that experience into curating?

HW: My father was a jazz drummer. Growing up, live music and musicians were in my life: I went away to college to study art history [in Chicago] and took up a free-format, jazz radio show with a non-profit group called Southend Musicworks. The immediacy of doing live gigs and being a presenter, that’s a different kind of relationship to the audience than organizing exhibitions. The rush of the avant-garde free jazz scene in Chicago, seeing gigs by Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, I’m still chasing that high. It doesn’t matter whether it’s presenting public programs or organizing exhibitions, that’s really what I’m after: sharing that kind of experience with people.