Monira Al Qadiri

Biography

Monira Al Qadiri’s paternal grandfather sang on a pearl-diving boat: his job was to encourage the divers. Pearling was Kuwait’s main industry until the country became a petrostate. That chain, from pearls to oil, would hold her work together for many years.

She was born in 1983 in Dakar, where her father was a diplomat. Her mother, Thuraya Al-Baqsami, was an artist, and her older sister, Fatima, became an artist and musician.

In 1985 the family moved back to Kuwait and lived through the 1991 Gulf War. At sixteen Al Qadiri went to Japan. She studied there for ten years, earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, and in 2010 completed a PhD in Intermedia Art at the Tokyo University of the Arts. Her dissertation was called “The Aesthetics of Sadness in the Middle East”; in it she examines poetry, music, art and religious practices in the light of contemporary oil culture.

In 2011 she moved to Beirut for a residency at Ashkal Alwan and spent six years researching the history of museums in the Gulf. In 2013, together with her sister Fatima, Nanu Al Hamad, Khalid Al Gharaballi, Sophia Al Maria, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid and Amal Khalaf, she founded the art collective GCC. The name repeats the English abbreviation of the Gulf Cooperation Council, an economic and political union of the states of the region. In 2016 she began a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

There she produced a series of 3D-printed sculptures resembling drill heads. They were coated in an iridescent, car-paint-like lacquer, a process she developed over several workshops with a technician from a paint laboratory. In her own observation, pearls and oil lie at opposite ends of the same dichroic colour spectrum. For one of the biennials the series was enlarged to monumental size. “Spectrum I” belongs to the same circle of work, as does the sculpture “Empire Dye” (2018): an enormously enlarged shell of the murex snail, in bright violet. That is the colour of the alarm that flashes on oil rigs when they are about to explode. To my mind the shell reads as a warning, and it is linked to the climate crisis.

A second recurring theme is gender. In her early performances she appeared in men’s clothes, calling it “a vehicle for transformation” and chameleon-ism. In “Abu Athiyya (Father of Pain)” she portrays the southern Iraqi singer Yas Khodhor. She traces her interest in drag to her youth in Kuwait, where women stayed at home for safety reasons: to be a man meant to be strong. As a teenager she often had a buzz cut and wore fake moustaches. She no longer performs in drag, but in her videos, for example “Behind the Sun” (2013) and “Rumours of Affluence” (2012), the narration is spoken by deep male voices.

Her solo exhibitions have been held at the Sultan Gallery in Kuwait (2014), Gasworks in London (2017), Kunstverein Göttingen (2019), Haus der Kunst in Munich (2020), the Berlinische Galerie (2021), the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2022), and Kunsthaus Bregenz and UCCA Dune in China (2023). She has taken part in group exhibitions in New York (the New Museum, 2014; MoMA PS1, 2019–2020), in Beirut (the Sursock Museum, 2016) and at the Palais de Tokyo (2020), as well as in the 2022 Venice Biennale. In 2022 she received the Triennale Small Sculpture Award, and in 2023 the Prix Nice (He)art x Asia Now. Her films and videos have been screened, among other places, at the Centre Pompidou (2016), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2018) and the Belvedere in Vienna (2022). She lives and works in Berlin.