GROUP SHOW WITH MONIRA AL QADIRI
NATURE. SOUND. MEMORY.

KUNSTHAUS BASELLAND, BASEL, SWITZERLAND
10 MARCH – 9 JULY 2023

"Holy Quarter" begins with the story of the British explorer Harry St. John Philby, who crossed the Empty Quarter desert region in the 1930s, looking for the ruins of an ancient city. Instead of an Atlantis of the Sands, he found the remains of what he believed to be a volcano, which turned out to be one of the largest impact craters formed by a meteorite. Oman is one of the largest meteoritic impact sites, and many fossils found in the country are millions of years old. The filming locations for "Holy Quarter" are all situated in this region, and some of them are mythical rather than actual sites. These represent a connection with the universe and the origin of the Earth as well as the search for a missing empirical certainty. As one of the oldest and most untouched habitats, the desert serves as a place to search for traces of the meaning of life. Here, the work turns to the region’s past as a countermeasure to economic-political shortcomings and the contradictions between conservative structures and new technologies that are used to drive future visions of society.© Images Maximilian Reuter

FEATURED ARTIST

MONIRA AL QADIRI
Monira Al Qadiri (b. 1983) is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. Spanning sculpture, installation, film, and performance, Al Qadiri’s multifaceted practice is based on research into the cultural histories of the Gulf region. Her interpretation of the Gulf’s so-called “petro-culture” is manifested through speculative scenarios that take inspiration from science fiction, autobiography, traditional practices, and pop culture, resulting in uncanny and covertly subversive works that destabilize mythologies of statecraft and modernization as well as traditional notions of gender. Tracing the delicate ecologies threate...
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