MONIRA AL QADIRI
LANDSCAPES OF EXTRACTION

DE BALIE, AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
22 DECEMBER 2023 — 7 JANUARY 2024

Fossil fuels, oil – and our reliance on it – are at the forefront of the climate crisis. The Kuwaiti visual artist Monira Al Qadiri researches how entire cultures, histories and landscapes are exploited by the addictive but destructive substance of oil. Her work – spanning sculptures, videos, and performance – shows how oil-soaked our culture is today and invites visitors to imagine a future without it.

© Image by KÖNIG GALERIE

Uncanny landscapes, golden drill bits, speaking murex seashells, and pearl diving songs. In the world that Al Qadiri creates she plays with the paradoxical beauty of the destructive oil industry. She pre-empts the end of oil by creating monuments and mythologies around it, as if to eulogise it, like a long-lost history from ancient peoples.

Al Qadiri’s work draws upon the transformation of her home country Kuwait and the broader Gulf region. A landscape that was, prior to the discovery and extraction of oil, characterized by the culture of pearl diving. Al Qadiri’s ongoing search for historical ties between the pre- and post-oil Kuwait shows how our mindset of extraction today is entangled with the colonial histories of crude oil.

© Image by KÖNIG GALERIE

The connection of her work to the Netherlands is hard to miss: colonial larceny, the looting of raw materials, and shipping them away overseas. Is oil the very stuff that connects the scarred landscapes across the world, from the Gulf to the Nigerdelta and the North Sea?

This exhibition is a partner project of the Hartwig Art Foundation.

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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