ART CITIES:DUBAI-Sophia Al Maria
For nearly a decade, Sophia Al Mariahas been finding ways to describe 21st 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.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: The Third Line Gallery Archive
“EVERYTHING MUST GO”, is the first solo-exhibition by Sophia Al Maria in the U.A.E. Presenting new works, the exhibition creates an immersive experience, capturing the chaotic, almost apocalyptic act of consuming. The viewer is invited to experience illusions of order in underlying confusion and pandemonium. 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 Contemporary megalopolis. The shopping-mall became a fantasy of a western lifestyle. Al Maria in her writings on Gulf Futurism* and in her memoir, “The Girl Who Fell To Earth” (2012), but with her latest body of work has done something that is even bolder, she has decided to take on the culture of consumption and to investigate the act of purchasing as the ultimate 21st Century religious rite. “Black Friday” (2016) shown here outside museum context for the first time, is a projected video featuring primarily empty malls in Doha and offers a moody, sinister take on shopping. Designed at seemingly impossible scale with incredible heights, the malls featured in the video appear as dizzying temples dedicated to artifice and capitalism, showing how scripted environment of the shopping mall is a form of default religious architecture in a culture of consumerism. In her new series of works, Al Maria introduces a playful twist, juxtaposing emblems of consumerism with military jargon and captures the crux of the end of days where chaos and destruction are met by a violent military attempt to reinstate order. EVERYTHING MUST GO consists of a large series of stills taken from Black Friday’s “The Litany” series‚ an installation of numerous electronic devices displaying flickering, short and glitching loops of countless consumption references, each printed with either a fake beauty product term or military idiom. When read together or even at random, the grouping of words result in absurd and obscene combinations.
*Gulf Futurism is a 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: The Third Line, Al Quoz 1, Dubai, Duration: 22/2-1/4/17, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.thethirdline.com
