Thuraya Al-Baqsami’s daughter, a pioneer of modern art in Kuwait in the 60s, Monira Al Qadiri was born in Senegal and grew up in Japan. In 2010 she obtained her PhD in Multimedia Art at Tokyo University of Arts, where her research focused on the aesthetics of sadness in poetry, music, art and religious practices of the Middle East. Through sculpture, performance, photography and video-art, Al Qadiri’s work explores both personal and social themes with black humour and melancholy, producing powerful and disturbing speculative scenarios that look to the past, while investigating possible futures for the so-called “petrocultures” and more extensively for global political networks. Her gleaming and monumental sculptures coated in chrome paint, OR-BIT 1-8 (2016-2018) and ORBITAL (2022), become symbols of environmental devastation.
