UCCA Dune presents “Haunted Water,” Monira Al Qadiri’s first institutional solo exhibition in China. Featuring representative works from the artist’s recent practice alongside new commissions, the exhibition utilizes video, sculpture, and installation to explore how pearl diving and oil extraction have shaped the past and present of the Gulf Region.
Spanning video, sculpture, and installation, “Haunted Water” offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work in recent years, along with four new pieces commissioned by UCCA. Throughout, Al Qadiri investigates how the oil industry has transformed her home country of Kuwait and the broader Gulf Region, and as well as the impact these large-scale environmental and economic changes have had on social relations and local lives. The exhibition also touches upon traditions related to pearl diving, previously a major economic activity in the Gulf before oil. At UCCA Dune, this thematic focus subtly resonates with the seaside setting of Beidaihe, itself undergoing economic transformation. Approaching human and non-human subjects alike, “Haunted Water” intends to explore how we interact with history, personal or otherwise, through the vehicle of art.
The exhibition’s artworks oscillate between two central motifs: oil and pearls. All over the world—not least of all in the Gulf Region—petro-capitalism has infiltrated ecologies, national politics, and everyday life. Petroleum can provide countries with wealth and the impetus for development, but may also lead to colonization, economic imperialism, inequality, and instability. Oil compresses time and space: it is biological energy, brought into existence by the sun eons ago, accumulated and transformed for millions of years before being used by humanity to accelerate history. Positioned as a non-human subject in Al Qadiri’s practice, oil has a number of similarities with the exhibition’s other motif, pearls. Both are culturally classified under the much-mythologized category of “resources,” and the unique optical refraction of oil surfaces is reminiscent of the iridescence of pearls. Furthermore, prior to the discovery and extraction of oil in the Gulf, pearl diving was the region’s main economic activity, representing the pre-modern antecedent to petro-modernity. Both oil and pearls blur distinctions between living and non-living entities, leading biological and historical temporalities to interact and overlap.
More information on the event can be found here.