Crude Eye

Growing up in Kuwait close to an oil refinery by the sea, the artist would create stories for the distant petroleum operation while passing by on a traffic bridge. As she envisioned an expansive panorama of lights, fire, smoke, and towers, Al Qadiri imagined it was a city-metropolis—"filled with beings and phantoms from another world.” This dream-like film hearkens back to these childhood memories, fusing eerie, slow views of a reconstructed miniature refinery with lines from poems about city lights and industrial landscapes. Crude Eye blurs reality with speculative memory, and we are unable to tell if the scene is a real place or a fantasy. The artist says: “The work attempts to reconcile a sense of childlike wonder with the toxic environmental destruction that the refinery inherently represents.”