ART-PRESENTATION: Sophia Al Maria-Black Friday
Raised Muslim, Sophia Al-Maria traveled back and forth as a child between her American mother in U.S.A. and her Bedouin father in Qatar, where she witnessed the transformation of Doha from a desert outpost into a modern megalopolis. Much of her creative output, including her video and sound installations and her “The Girl Who Fell to Earth”, is preoccupied with “Gulf Futurism”*.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art Archive
For her first solo exhibition in the U.S.A., Sophia Al-Maria debuts “Black Friday”, a new video and installation. For nearly 10 years, Al-Maria has been finding ways to describe 21st Century life in the Gulf Arab nations through art, writing, and filmmaking. The exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art continues this examination by focusing on the Gulf’s embrace of the shopping mall. In Al-Maria’s view, the mall in both the Gulf and the U.S.A., 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 ‘90s and early ‘00s is something Al-Maria witnessed firsthand, having been raised between U.S.A. 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. Her book “The Girl who Fell to Earth” is the coming-of-age story of a self-described “Qatarican” (Qatari/American) which takes the reader on a zig-zagging journey from a farm in Washington State to a Bedouin town in Qatar, and on to a houseboat on the Nile and the hustle and bustle of Cairo. The result is something very far from the usual “tone and content of the popular genre-memoirs of the victimized-Muslim-woman”.
* Term Sophia Al-Maria coined while studying art at London’s Goldsmiths University to describe a dystopian vision of the changes sweeping the Arabian Gulf, the spread of technology and conspicuous consumerism as well as the environmental fallout from planting skyscrapers in the middle of a desert.
Info: Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, New York, Duration: 2/7-31/10/16, Mon-Sun 10:30-18:00, http://whitney.org
