MONIRA AL QADIRI
CHAMELEON

ARKEN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, ISHØJ, DENMARK
13 NOVEMBER 2025 – 6 APRIL 2026

ARKEN presents a major exhibition with Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri, who will install works throughout ARKEN's Art Axis: floating sculptures shaped like petrochemical molecules, pearlescent, levitating drill heads, and a video work that presents an oil refinery through the imagination of a child. The air is filled with gigantic shimmering forms, motionless yet bursting with energy. As we move around them, their surfaces shift in the changing light, revealing the spectrum of their colours. They are enormous iridescent jewels in which reflections become otherworldly.Oil is everywhere: in your phone and your cosmetics, in the fuel tank of a jet, in the children's plastic lunch box, in your new shoes − even in your chewing gum. Petrochemicals, converted from oil, saturate our contemporary life through global industry, transportation and heating. What will a future without this peculiar liquid drawn from deep within the Earth’s crust be like?

Monira Al Qadiri – Chameleon, 2025, Installation views, ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art. Photos: Anders Sune Berg

FEATURED ARTIST

MONIRA AL QADIRI
Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983) is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. Spanning sculpture, installation, film, and performance, Al Qadiri’s multifaceted practice is based on research into the cultural histories of the Gulf region. Her interpretation of the Gulf’s so-called “petro-culture” is manifested through speculative scenarios that take inspiration from science fiction, autobiography, traditional practices, and pop culture, resulting in uncanny and covertly subversive works that destabilize mythologies of statecraft and modernization as well as traditional notions of gender. Tracing the delicate ecologies threate...
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