Monira Al Qadiri – Jameel Arts Centre

Monira Al Qadiri

Behind the Sun

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Artwork Details

Artist

Monira Al Qadiri

Title

Behind the Sun

Date

2013

Medium

Single Channel video (sound, 10 min)

Dimensions

missing info

Credit Line

Art Jameel Collection

Work Description

After the first Gulf War in 1991, countless fields in Kuwait were set ablaze by retreating Iraqi troops, an act of eco-terrorism that is widely considered to be one of the worst intentional environmental disasters in history. The months following the war were nothing short of the classic image of a biblical apocalypse: the earth belching fire and the black scorched sky felt like a portrait of hell as it should be, an almost romanticised vision of the end of the world. These were Monira Al Qadiri’s earliest memories and associations with oil, growing up in Kuwait in the 1990s.

In 1992 Werner Herzog’s seminal Lessons of Darkness was released, a dystopic documentary of the oil fires and aftermath of the war in Kuwait shot on 16-millimetre film. Composed of sweeping aerial footage shot from a helicopter with a Wagnerian soundtrack and creepy Teutonic voiceover, the film decontextualises the landscape and situation. For Behind the Sun, Al Qadiri, working nearly two decades later, grounded the event back into its context by the use of contemporaneous local archives, using a selection of VHS video footage shot from the ground with a handheld camera by a Kuwaiti journalist. Juxtaposed against these dramatic scenes – frames choked with plumes of thick black smoke and flickering orange flames – are booming audio monologues from Islamic television programmes of the same period, originally broadcast in Kuwait. At the time, the tools used to represent religion were geared towards mysticism, visualising God through the sublime wonders of nature. Trees, waterfalls and mountains were the visual staple of religious media, and the narration was not that of the Quran, but of Arabic Sufi poetry recited by a skilled orator with a deep voice, especially powerful when heard against the images of fire spurting vigorously and mysteriously out of the ground.

Artist Biography

Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983, Dakar, Senegal) lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Monira Al Qadiri is a visual artist whose work explores unconventional gender identities, petrocultures and their possible futures, as well as legacies of corruption. Spanning sculpture, installation, film and performance, her multifaceted practice is mainly based on research into the cultural histories of the Gulf region and manifested through speculative scenarios that take inspiration from science fiction, autobiography, traditional practices and pop culture, resulting in uncanny and covertly subversive works. Al Qadiri received a PhD in intermedia art from Tokyo University of the Arts (2010) and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at numerous international institutions, such as BOZAR, Brussels, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, US (both 2024); De Balie, Amsterdam, UCCA Dune, Beijing and Kunstaus Bregenz (all 2023); Guggenheim Bilbao (2022); Hans der Kunst, Munich (2020); the Sursock Museum, Beirut and Gasworks, London (both 2017). She has participated in many biennials such as Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023) and 16 (2025); 24th Biennial of Sydney (2024); 59th Venice Biennale, the 1st Diriyah Contemporary Biennale and 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (all 2022), and the Asian Art Biennale, Taiwan (2021). Her videos and short films have been screened at MoMA, New York (2018); Rotterdam Film Festival (2018); Kunsthalle Schirn (2017), Le Centre Pompidou (2016) and Berlin International Film Festival (2014).

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