Sophia Al-Maria
Sophia Al Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker. Her work has been exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale, the New Museum in New York, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
“The Future Was Desert, Part I” (From the “war-weather” continuum)
Sophia Al-Maria builds a visual narrative illustrating the current and future desertification of the planet. The temporality of the past and the future collapses in the video art work, as her narrative traverses vast historical and geological times. Working with an archive of visuals from archeological, anthropological, and scientific missions to other planets, her video proposes a disjuncture between the historical scale of human time as against the geological timescale of the planet that remains unfathomable and inaccessible to us.
“The Future Was Desert, Part II”
“Black Friday”
Sophia Al-Maria’s exhibition at the Whitney Museum (2016) marked her first solo show in the United States. For nearly a decade, she had been finding ways to describe twenty-first-century life in the Gulf Arab nations through art, writing, and filmmaking. She coined the term "Gulf Futurism" to explain the stunning urban and economic development in the region over the last decades, as well as the environmental damage, religious conservatism, and historical amnesia that have accompanied it. Her exhibition at the Whitney focused on the Gulf’s embrace of the shopping mall.
In Al-Maria’s view, the mall in both the Gulf and the United States—along with its attendant consumerism—occupies "a weirdly neutral shared zone between cultures that are otherwise engaged in a sort of war of information and image," waged through both traditional and social media. The proliferation of malls in the Gulf in the late 1990s and early 2000s is something Al-Maria witnessed firsthand, having been raised between Washington State and Qatar. Her new video, “Black Friday”, is a rumination on shopping malls everywhere as secular temples of capitalism. Beneath the projected video lies “The Litany”, an installation of flickering electronic devices displaying short, glitchy loops—a heap of old screens that acts as a coded history of consumption, conflict, and desire.