MONIRA AL QADIRI
HERO

BERLINISCHE GALERIE, BERLIN, GERMANY
11 JULY 2025 – 17 AUGUST 2026

OPENING
10 JULY 2025 | 6 PM

In her work, Monira Al Qadiri focuses on the sociocultural impacts of the oil industry as well as its past and future. She has been researching and working on this topic for more than ten years and has shaped the discourse around oil, patriarchy, and globalization. Her works reflect on the connections between the establishment of oil as the leading fossil fuel in the middle of the twentieth century and the expansion of consumer capitalism in the post-war period. She often bases her art on autobiographical experiences, including life in Kuwait in the 1980s and 1990s, and critically examines prevailing historical and political narratives.  Addressing the issue of oil invariably involves addressing the history of human interaction with the earth, both its exploitation and its resistance. For the Berlinische Galerie, Al Qadiri is developing a site-specific installation – consisting of a large-format mural, objects, and sound – in which oil is far more than just a ‘resource’. It also symbolizes the violence, memories, and individual stories linked to its extraction.

The world’s first modern oil tanker was named SS MUREX, after a spiky seashell found on the ocean floor. Built by the founder of what is today Shell, the ship's name originates with the family’s previous commercial enterprise before oil exploration: buying and selling seashells for decorative purposes—a fashionable trend that thrived during the Victorian age. Traditionally, a ship's naming and christening ceremony were two intertwined events, meant to bring good fortune to the vessel, its crew, and its passengers. And in this case, the naming ceremony bore enormous fruit: hundreds of oil tankers were later named after different seashells in the decades that followed. This trend continues into the present, despite the reality that fossil fuels have mutated into being the biggest polluters of marine life that the world has ever known.

Monira Al Qadiri, SS MUREX (TBT), 2023

SS MUREX presents a physical window into this era of oil exploration by way of illuminated ships’ portholes, allowing viewers to peer into scenes of transoceanic movement on the high seas, as if they had embarked on the naval journey themselves. Archival images of oil tankers from different points in time, all named after murex shells, are shown. The images highlight the toxic reddish paint on these ships’ hulls, another silent destroyer of creatures living in the depths of the sea. The reddish biocide paint tributyltin, known as TBT, protects oil tankers from accruing algae, barnacles, and mussels (in a process commonly called “anti-fouling”), but it has also caused bizarre changes and strange contaminations in the natural environment due to its rapid leakage into the water. For example, TBT contamination causes female Murex mollusks to change their gender, impairing their ability to spawn and devastating gastropod populations.