Sand Begets Glass

In the 1990s, Sophia Al-Maria exiled herself from American teenhood by choosing to live in her grandmother’s home in the Qatari capital, Doha. There, she had a front-row seat for the cataclysmic cultural and environmental changes unleashed on the Gulf by extraction industries, climate change and mobile technologies – the subjects that have become the focus of her work. The dark sides of technology and late capitalism are the thematic hallmarks of her films, installations and writings. She first discussed these issues in her essays on ‘Gulf futurism’ – a concept she initially articulated in 2007 – and in her memoir-as-novel The Girl Who Fell to Earth  (2012). The fragmenting identities explored in her writing continue to inform her installations and film projects, while her unfinished feature film, the rape-revenge fantasy Beretta, looks at sexual violence in Egypt. Characterized by a pessimism she calls ‘doomy’, her work certainly has a dark seam running through it but, in conversation, Al-Maria reveals a lively sense of history and family, as well as a profound curiosity about the world. She talks, too, about her first US solo show, which opens in July at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. 

Jennifer Kabat   When you first started talking about ‘Gulf futurism’, it began with mobile phones and shopping malls, while your 2014 show, ‘Virgin with a Memory’ at Cornerhouse in Manchester, explored sexual violence. What are your plans for the Whitney? 

Sophia Al-Maria   I want to do something relevant to the Gulf but not Gulf-specific, to avoid alienating an American audience. So: the shopping mall. I’ve been stewing on it as a global interzone that transports everyone to the same-yet-other place. But I don’t want to give you any spoilers. Just know it will be scary.

JK   Fear is a big element in your work. How does it manifest in shopping malls? 

SA  When you go to one, you experience a series of subtle cold shudders. It’s part of the scripted environment the architect Victor Gruen created in his original plans for malls in the US from the 1950s onwards. The ‘Gruen transfer’ – the moment in which the mall’s intentionally confusing architecture disorients people – is one part of the horror. Your jaw goes slack, your walking pace slows, you’re more sensitive to suggestion. Then there’s the confession booth of the fitting room: there’s grey light; nothing fits right; you’re sweating. You’re confronted by the ‘real’ you. It’s this temperature-controlled hell-scape and you have to buy your way out. I’ve seen it in Hong Kong, the Middle East and London. The malls have all the same stores: you get this repetition and it hurts. I don’t know how to articulate it yet but, visually, I’m hoping to get there.

JK  I know: I can go from barely noticing something in a store to thinking it will transform my life. In your work, you recognize your own experiences and use them as a larger way of thinking about the world. With the Whitney show, though, you said you were worried about alienating audiences and being too Gulf-specific? 

SA  I’ve been having these conversations since I was at university in Cairo. My friends were suspicious of anyone who played the native-informant card. Since then, I’ve written a memoir and I’ve used home videos in my work but I can have conflicted feelings about them – like with my installation Sisters (2015).

JK Sisters uses found YouTube footage of girls dancing in their bedrooms. The video can be read in multiple ways. I showed it when I was teaching in Qatar and New York; in Doha, it sparked a shouting match between students about the representation of Qatari women. 

You can’t talk about the future without considering the past, and the present in less than dust. Sophia Al-Maria

Original article on Frieze