Growing up in Kuwait close to an oil refinery by the sea, the artist would create stories for the distant petroleum operation while passing by on a traffic bridge. As she envisioned an expansive panorama of lights, fire, smoke, and towers, Al Qadiri imagined it was a city-metropolis—"filled with beings and phantoms from another world.” This dream-like film hearkens back to these childhood memories, fusing eerie, slow views of a reconstructed miniature refinery with lines from poems about city lights and industrial landscapes. Crude Eye blurs reality with speculative memory, and we are unable to tell if the scene is a real place or a fantasy. The artist says: “The work attempts to reconcile a sense of childlike wonder with the toxic environmental destruction that the refinery inherently represents.”
In Al Qadiri’s latest project, Crude Eye (2022), the artist brings to life a vision she witnessed as a child—that of a distant, radiant cityscape. The artist recalls a sprawling metropolis composed of lights, metal, smoke and fire, akin to the imagery of the cartoons and science fiction films she watched during childhood. The imagined city, however, turned out not to be a city at all, but an oil refinery. In this installation, Al Qadiri transposes her memory of the hyper-technological cityscape into a miniature model then filmed to compose this video work, which is reminiscent of an opening sequence for a post-apocalyptic science fiction film. The video of this sculpture is accompanied by music, evoking a child-like soundscape of video games and cartoons, alongside a whispered reading by the artist, detailing her secret childhood fantasies of the city. Inviting the audience to share in a towering mirage of a futuristic city, the artist provokes the viewer to conceive of their own illusory worlds hidden beneath the facade of our material one.
Add to playlist