Crude Eye

Monira Al Qadiri employs myth-making, fantasy and memory to unearth alternative worlds and possible futures whose potentials lie dormant within present reality. As a Kuwaiti born in Dakar and educated in Japan, the artist is known for examining the transnational and interconnected experience of the Gulf through a lens which gives equal weight to the truths and fictions that comprise the region.

Her video work Crude Eye (2022) reconstructs a vivid childhood memory: a distant, radiant cityscape. The artist recalls a sprawling metropolis made of lights, metal, smoke and fire, akin to the imagery of the cartoons and science fiction films she watched during childhood. However, upon closer inspection, this imagined city turned out not to be a city at all, but an oil refinery. Al Qadiri transposed her memory of the hyper-technological cityscape into a miniature model, and then filmed it to compose this video work, which is reminiscent of an opening sequence of a post-apocalyptic science fiction film. Accompanied by an ominous soundtrack composed by her sister, musician Fatima Al Qadiri, Crude Eye evokes a child-like soundscape of video games and cartoons. Over this unsettling score, a whispered voice recites the artist’s own poems, weaving together her secret childhood fantasies about the refinery as an enchanted city. 

Layered with irony, the work simultaneously marvels at the refinery’s monumental grandeur while subtly interrogating its ecological and cultural consequences. By manipulating scale and perspective through photography, videography and narration, Al Qadiri invites the viewer to conceive of their own illusory worlds hidden beneath the facade of our material one.

Her 2023 work, Gastromancer, currently on view at Sharjah Biennial 16, continues Al Qadiri’s exploration of the petroleum industry’s ceaseless extraction of resources. In this installation, two suspended fiberglass murex shells engage in a haunting dialogue recounting their unintentional transformation from female to male due to industrial pollution. Their exchange highlights the biological morphing caused by the seepage of tributyltin (TBT)—a red-hued biocide paint meant to prevent algae, barnacles and mussels from latching onto oil tankers.