Where the Birds Are Watching

In Bird Watch, Kuwaiti artist and filmmaker Zahra Al-Mahdi crafts a surreal, quietly subversive series that slips between the observational and the allegorical. Known for her distinctive visual language—a blend of hand-drawn animation, lo-fi aesthetics, and poetic voiceover—Al-Mahdi invites viewers into fragmented landscapes where birds become both witnesses and metaphors. These avian figures hover at the edges of human systems, observing domestic rituals, political decay, and fleeting moments of intimacy. But they also echo something deeper: a sense of quiet resistance, of life persisting at the periphery.

Still from Bird Watch - Poem No. 6 :"Hair"

The series draws on Gulf-specific textures while resisting easy categorization. It lives somewhere between the personal and the planetary, the experimental and the archival. Like a sketchbook or a dream-journal in motion, Bird Watch flits through time and tone, never settling. Al-Mahdi’s work often revolves around themes of memory, surveillance, and absurdity, and here, she fuses them with an understated ecological urgency. It’s not just about watching birds—it’s about what birds see when they watch us. In a region where the air is thick with history and silence, Bird Watch opens a window into speculative storytelling with political plumage.

Still from Bird Watch - Poem No. 4: "Neurosis: Discipline" 

Zahra Al-Mahdi’s work stands at the intersection of introspection and invention, quietly expanding the possibilities of what animation and art can do in the Gulf. Bird Watch is not just a series—it’s a gesture, a way of looking and being looked at, reframing surveillance as intimacy and observation as care. In a world saturated with noise, Al-Mahdi listens. Through her birds—drawn, imagined, and symbolic—she reminds us that the margins often hold the sharpest insights, and that sometimes, it is the smallest wings that carry the heaviest questions. 

Still from Bird Watch - Episode No: Middle

"Film is the best medium to solidify the bond between the sciences and the humanities. It disintegrates all separations and hierarchies between them. This makes it the perfect medium to questions all binaries, and really show the multiplicities in pursuing truths. Heterogeneous storytelling and contrapuntal voices. I think Bird Watch is so aligned with the Science New Wave because it really does show that artists and scientists are observers before anything else. Different kinds of filmmaking are different ways of immersive experiences, either for the filmmaker themselves, the subject, or the viewer. This echos so much of the artistic experience as well as the scientific method. I can’t think of a way to produce anything that doesn’t begin with and revolve around observation." words by Zahra Al-Mahdi

About the artist

Artist, writer and filmmaker Zahra Al-Mahdi's work reveals the unintended impacts humans have on their societies and ecosystems. She is known for collage work using ink sketches layered over photographs, animation on live action and installations that deal with dissected anatomical figures that probe themes in science fiction, post-colonialism and post-structuralism. Visit Zouz's Habitat Profile.