The Future Was Desert

A companion piece to The Magical State, Ziruma reveals the bloody Wayuu cosmogony.

We arrive with New York heiress Lucy Savage fresh off the transatlantic steamer and ready for love and marriage in exotic climes. But when her husband Hugo does not receive her in the way she expected, she spins off into the surprising, diverse and degenerate world of Tangier in 1955.

An adaptation of Moby Dick as a silent film and theatre piece with a postcolonial and queer reading that highlights its marginal characters.

An exquisite corpse, the film extends the artist’s interests in the writings of Etel Adnan, the coming present and the personal as political.

Remixing the collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Tiger Strike Red is an oneiric jaunt through an alternative art history that finds playful linkages between classical marble sculpture, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, representations of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes, AI art, and an 18th-century South Indian automaton depicting a tiger mauling a British colonial soldier.

My Blackest self, whose whitest death, is luxury. I am no stranger anymore. The world is love to me.

Al-Maria’s Mirror Cookie installation presents an intentionally disjointed monologue that references a self-help technique known as “mirror work.” It gradually develops into an impassioned improvisation delivered directly to the camera, as if the fourth wall she’s breaking is a reflection. As Bai Lings writes in one of her cookies, “We are our own mirror, reflecting the lights within.”

Black Friday presents a hypnotic rendering of two large shopping malls in Doha that become a sacred sanctuary where the two protagonists, the artist and her sister, both wearing abayas, walk up and down endless escalators, in a sort of relentless procession inside immense empty and opulent marble-clad spaces. The title of the work refers to the Americanization of local customs: Black Friday, a day of unbridled shopping, is now widespread around the world. The final scene depicts the two women exhausted, stretched out on the sumptuous marble floor, representing the despair of mass consumerism.

A belly dance-off mixing femme and masc in a sensual homage to the form.

A Wayuu woman is possessed by a 40 million-year-old oil demon.

A surreal interview with Chinese-American actress Bai Ling, cast as a 'love goddess' and speaking on the subject of vengefulness.

A tribute to the disappearing Arabian humpback whale population, tracing its near extinction as a consequence of the high-speed development of the Persian Gulf.

'Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.' - J.G. Ballard

Etel Adnan's poem 'The Arab Apocalypse' from 1989 describes a future world in a state of emergency. The poem is the suggestive science fiction backdrop of Sophia Al-Maria's performative video work 'Beast Type Song', which is set in the abandoned space that previously housed Saint Martin's School of Art in London.