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monira al qadiri
About the Artist
Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983, Dakar, Senegal) is a visual artist who lives and works in Berlin. Her art focuses on a myriad of social issues, from gender identity to the relationship between oil and culture to the hidden legacies of colonialism. Al Qadiri obtained a PhD in intermedia art from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010, where she specialised in the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle East. She has held solo exhibitions at many leading institutions and organisations including the Guggenheim Bilbao (2022); Art Gallery Burlington, Ontario (2021); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2020); Gasworks, London (2017); Stroom Den Haag, the Hague (2017); and the Sultan Gallery, Kuwait (2014).
Al Qadiri began her practice in Japan, where she lived from age sixteen to twenty-seven. She developed artistic interests in gender performance, masculinity, sexual identity and politics, as well as challenging gender norms. Al Qadiri’s mother, the celebrated Kuwaiti artist Thuraya Al Baqsami, has been a significant source of inspiration in the artist’s journey towards her own means of creative expression.
Engaging with the experiences of her parents allows Al Qadiri to explore the ‘pre- and post-oil world’: how ways of living changed during the ‘golden age of Kuwait’ in the 1960s and 1970s.[1]Her father was a singer on a pearl-diving boat, an industry that dominated for around two thousand years until the advent of the oil industry. The artist probes into cultural identity and its evolution in parallel with industrial development in the specific context of an increasing dependency on oil markets.
Al Qadiri’s recent participation in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, showed a body of work exploring the symbolic aspects of oil production: the artist coated 3D-printed sculptures with iridescent automotive paint to emulate the shapes of drill heads. They seemingly float, just above the surface of their supporting platforms, made to levitate by means of a commercial magnetic levitation module.
Monira Al Qadiri by Raisa Hagiu
Courtesy the artist and König Galerie
WORKS IN THE COLLECTION
Monira Al Qadiri, "OR-BIT-ING 1", 2022
3D print, plastic, automotive paint, rotation platform, 30 × 30 × 30 cm
Unique
Courtesy the artist and the König Galerie
OR-BIT-ING 1 (2022) initiates an ominous conversation about the process of obtaining oil, a process which fragments and destroys the earth. Al Qadiri highlights the unknown, ‘alien’ aspects of the industry, pointing to the developing technologies and infrastructure that seem to be ever-prospering at the expense of our personal welfare and our planet. The work makes a connection between the artist and her grandfather, using colour and form to explore intergenerational relationships. Since pearl and oil share the quality of iridescence, Al Qadiri’s sculptures allow her simultaneously to evoke the past, present and future of the markets ruling our globalised society.
The drills are deliberately theatricalised and elaborate, and the viewer is invited to question what they see. Drawing attention to the depleting nature of oil as a resource, Al Qadiri’s sculptures appear rotating in empty space, not as contemporary industrial objects, but as mystical relics.