Monira Al Qadiri is not someone you can put in a box. At the age of 16, she convinced her parents, and the Kuwaiti Minister of Education, to send her to Japan for a language scholarship that was normally reserved for boys. “I cannot believe they actually let me go,” she exclaims, flicking a cropped, styled lock behind her ear. “It was my dream then but, I didn’t even know the difference between cartoons and reality. And they were going to let me go to Cartoonland.”
“It so happened that Japan was the biggest importer of oil from Kuwait at the time and that’s why this scholarship existed, I was the last person to go on it. When I first saw the information about it in the paper, I was on it. I made sure to get really good grades in school and invite the Minister of Education to my solo show of hyperrealist paintings,” she continues. She then rather precociously informed the Minister that she had received her parents’ approval to go to Japan, should they consider her for the grant.
It’s not that Al Qadiri wasn’t well-positioned to become an artist – her mother is a famous Kuwaiti artist (and her sister, Fatima, is also now a well-known electronic musician and digital media artist, who BESPOKE interviewed in issue 46) but for her, art arose from a different context. “It was what we would do during our play-time. During the Iran-Iraq war, we were kids. We were home and would draw all day, during the electricity cuts and the bombs.”
“I remember sketching an Iraqi solider squashed in a hamburger,” she pauses to smile. “Our mother would hide our drawings in the air-conditioning vents! She thought they were dangerous.” (They probably were.)
During that period of growing up, Al Qadiri also watched a lot of animations, which fermented her desire to go to Japan in what became a 10-year odyssey that included a Masters degree and a doctorate in the arts and media. Today, she is fluent in Japanese (she has even read the Qur’an in the language) yet the animations that drove her to the country in the first place, is a visual language she has left behind as an artist.
Still, her early 2006 works, such as ‘Visual Violence,’ which is described as ‘a journey through the landscape of a tortured man’s mind,’ and ‘Nightmare,’ a haunting animation of bearded Cyclops, naked fairy-like women and a beheaded chicken, evoke some of the masculinity themes that appear in her later work in video, sculpture and installation.
As we probe these obsessions in her artwork, she says, “You know it’s funny how everyone here wants to talk about their art,” referring to contemporary artists in Lebanon, in particular – Beirut is the place she made home after meeting her Lebanese artist husband in Dubai. “In Japan, you learn that the work should speak for itself, it’s a different experience of art while in the Arab world, we have a more visual than literary culture. Because of Japan, I’ve tried to keep my art autobiographical. You try and be true to the work, to the extent that you become it.” And part of this merging with her work relates to how Al Qadiri projects herself, often as a bearded man. Inevitably, I ask her to explain.
“The beard, especially the henna beard is such a foreign thing, unattainable to women,” she begins, showing me the early instances of when she first started playing with the idea of being a man, in incredible photos that her sister took of her, sometimes with a painted moustache, other times with a comb in her slicked-back and parted short hair, posing dramatically, totally taking on the character. “I would take the clothes from my dad’s closet,” she confesses.
“I guess men fascinate me. I remember how we were stuck at home: me, my mum and my sister while the men were out there, with the resistance. I thought they were so cool and I always wanted to be like them, even though the only problem is I’m heterosexual, so it wouldn’t actually work,” she says, chuckling about how relieved her parents were when she actually brought home a boyfriend, given her extreme boyishness during her teens.
But it is more than just being subversive or putting on a brave gender-defying alter-ego, Al Qadiri has long studied, much like an anthropologist, thought-provoking discourse, especially in her doctoral research, such as the link between masculinity and narcissism, between aesthetics and suffering, tragedy and self-indulgence. In her ‘Tragedy of the Self’ series (2009-2012), she has herself framed in gold, with lipstick, a dark veil, a long flowing black beard and a melancholic expression in what can be seen as an ironic depiction of religious iconography and saintliness.
Then there’s her 2013 ‘Dreamer’ sculpture, which she says is a kind of death mask. It comprises a mould of her own face in a glass coffin, wearing a two-metre long beard made of sheep hair. “It’s subconscious, perhaps it’s me mourning my own narcissism as a man,” she reflects succinctly.
In her 2008 music video, ‘Oh Torment’ (Wa Waila), based on a Kuwaiti folk song which plays a bit like kitsch, Monira is again present, except her face is painted black, she is wearing that omnipresent beard of irony and the men are dressed as women. This is a performative genre she calls ‘video-painting’ because the movements are flat, almost two-dimensional.
Not limited to these tongue-in-cheek self-portaits, Monira’s work extends to her academic researcher side, delving into macro-issues of religion and power. “Through that microcosm, which is myself, I try to expand to something bigger,” she explains. Her Prism series (ongoing from 2007) is a case in point, and links to her exploration of ‘the aesthetics of sadness’ and the way mourning is manifested in physical space. “It’s like how tragedy is always the height of the movie. I always had this attraction to the tragic moment and I tried to find it in actual space. I did research on where grief and suffering came from in Islam and how it’s influenced by Iran and Turkey, poetry or metaphysical ideas of life and death, as well as Sufi rituals – religion itself is a form of art.” And so for this series, she filmed the national Kuwaiti cemetery, Sulaibkhaat, which is divided into two parts that couldn’t be more different in character – one is a Sunni graveyard and the other Shi’ite.
“The Shi’ite one was more social, it was where people would meet, date, or pray.” The Sunni one, in contrast, was lifeless, bare and undecorated and yet Monira poses the question of which one can be considered sadder in terms of both aesthetics and experience; she says the answer isn’t so clear.
She has also ruminated on the oil industry such as in her 2013 apocalyptic-looking ‘Behind the Sun’ series, where she documents the burning of Kuwaiti oil fields in 1991 by Saddam during the Gulf war. “It was such an expression of his power. To us, it looked like the end of the world.” Or the 2014 ‘Alien Technology’ installation, which is a grotesque, octopus-like form that looks like an oil drill in black pearl – a reference to the forgotten pearl industry that came before the discovery of oil in the Gulf.
It’s true that Al Qadiri’s work is staunchly grounded in the Middle East thematically, but she will soon come full circle in an exciting partnership with Art Jameel and UK-based Crossway foundation. She has been appointed as artistic lead for Journey to Japan project that selects young applicants from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and the UK, to experience the arts in Japan over an immersive 2-week period. As the project head, Valeria Mariana, explained, “We were working with Monira on an unrelated film project when by chance, we found out about her experience with the creative industries in Japan.” And Al Qadiri will also soon be moving to Amsterdam to join her husband who has a residency there.
Constantly crossing geographic boundaries in her practice, Al Qadiri is someone who seems to be on a relentless creative journey but she remains modest, and humbly rooted, about her own artistic sensibilities. “You know with my parents’ generation in Kuwait in the 1960s and 1970s, it was a cultural renaissance, they were so progressive. And that culture lives on in us. We inherited it even though the landscape of our countries is different today.”
