A two-person exhibition blending the works and worlds of Sophia Al-Maria and Lydia Ourahmane, both of whom are immigrants to the UK. Existing works and a collaborative commission explore the idea of the ‘right to remain’ in the context of semi-feudal laws around property and ownership.
Sophia Al-Maria
Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture and film it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures.
With her friend and collaborator Fatima Al Qadiri, Al-Maria coined the term “Gulf Futurism” to describe the growing atomisation of individuals and the shifting ground of urban planning, aesthetics, and media, and their impact on everyday life in the post-oil Persian Gulf. Her cinematic artist’s videos are fuelled by the combination of critical rigour with an affective charge in their explorations of language, imperialism, and counter-histories – a deep investigation and dramatisation of the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental present.
Al-Maria’s debut exhibition in the United States, at the Whitney Museum of Art, 2016, attends to the Gulf’s embrace of consumerism. Black Friday features primarily of shots of empty shopping centres in Doha. An unseen narrator declares the mall as the place “where the glamorous heart of evil is born”, a place of entrapment and confusion complete with faces blurred beyond recognition and bodies collapsed on the floor.
Al-Maria was Whitechapel Gallery’s Writer in Residence 2018, resulting in her exhibition BCE comprising of films, performances and readings, including her first collaboration with the artist Sin Wai Kin. Her most recent collection of essays and writings, Sad Sack, was published by Book Works in 2019.
In 2023, Al-Maria presented the trilogy of videos together for the first time in the a solo exhibition, Not My Bag, at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. The trilogy of works includes Beast Type Song presented at Tate Britain, 2019; Tender Point Ruin commissioned by LUMA Foundation, Arles in 2021 and concluded with Tiger Strike Red, 2022 which formed the artists solo presentation at the Pavillion of Applied Arts, part of The Milk Of Dreams | 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
Sophia Al-Maria will open a major collaborative exhibition with Lydia Ourahmane at Spike Island, Bristol, in Summer 2024.