‘ARABFUTURISM: Selected Artworks: Monira Al Qadiri’

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​​​​​​​Mahmoud Darwish Chair and Bozar present an evening with Monira Al Qadiri, a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. She received a Ph.D. in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts, where her research was focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle-East stemming from poetry, music, art and religious practices. 

The video Diver (4mn, 2018) represents a new chapter of her ongoing search for historical ties between the pre- and post-oil worlds in the Arabian Gulf. For hundreds of years, the economy of the region was based on decorative pearls, with Al Qadiri’s own grandfather working as a singer on a pearling boat. The discovery of oil in the twentieth century transformed the affected societies and this part of history was erased. Al Qadiri choreographs synchronized swimmers, shining from pearls and oil, to a traditional pearl-diving song. 
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For Holy Quarter (extract, 2020), Al Qadiri filmed in Oman, one of the largest meteoric impact sites in the world. It starts with the British explorer Harry St. John Philby, who crossed the desert region in the 1930s, looking for the ruins of an ancient city. Instead of an Atlantis of the Sands, he found the remains of what he believed to be a volcano, which turned out to be one of the largest impact craters formed by a meteorite.
After the screening, Nedjma Hadj Benchelabi talks with Monira Al Qadiri about her work and her current practices