Monira Al Qadiri

Artists

Monira Al Qadiri

Press release

The air is filled with gigantic, glittering forms – immobile, yet bursting with energy. As we move around them, their surfaces change in the shifting light, revealing a spectrum of colors. They are enormous, shiny jewels, where light reflects in an almost magical way. Oil is everywhere: in your phone and your cosmetics, in the fuel tank of a jet, in children's plastic lunch boxes, in your new shoes – even in your chewing gum. Petrochemicals, derived from oil, permeate our modern lives through global industry, transport, and heating. What would a future without this peculiar liquid, drawn from the depths of the earth, look like? From autumn, ARKEN presents a major exhibition with the Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri, who will install works throughout ARKEN's Art Axis: floating balloon sculptures shaped like petrochemical molecules, pearlescent, hovering drill heads, and a video work where we see an oil refinery through a child's imagination. Al Qadiri (b. 1983) grew up in Kuwait, where the primary industry changed from pearl fishing to oil drilling in just one generation. In her art, she intertwines ancient mythology with a futuristic aesthetic and continuously questions how resource extraction and petro-culture have become an accepted part of our society – driven by profit. Al Qadiri creates a cosmos of many worlds and contradictions. Hostile, powerful drilling machines become beautiful, dreamlike technologies in Future Past 3 and Alien Technology (Diamond) – aimed at the sky instead of down into the earth. In the work Gastromancer, a pair of murex snail shells hover in a red atmosphere, reflecting on both the ecstasy and melancholy of their biological transformation in a polluted environment. With whimsical humor, Al Qadiri often plays with scale to emphasize the significance of her subjects. In the series BENZENE FLOAT, she transforms petrochemical molecules into monumental structures. In the video work Crude Eye, she shrinks a colossal oil refinery down to the size of a miniature model. Al Qadiri animates the invisible forces behind our current world order with playfulness and irony. What if the dinosaurs that were fossilized into oil millions of years ago began to sing back to us? What if an oil refinery was actually a city inhabited by beings from other worlds? And most importantly, she asks: What stories will we tell in the aftermath of oil?