Sophia Al-Maria

Historia

Sophia Al Maria is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, and aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. For the past few years, she has been carrying out research around the concept of Gulf Futurism. Her primary interests are around the isolation of individuals via technology and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism and industry, and the erasure of history and the blinding approach of a future no one is ready for. She explores these ideas with certain guidebooks and ideas including, but not limited to, Zizek’s The Desert of the Unreal, As-Sufi’s Islamic Book of the Dead, as well as imagery from Islamic eschatology, post humanism and the global mythos of Science Fiction.

Películas

Tiger Strike Red
Director
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.
Tender Point Ruin
An exquisite corpse, the film extends the artist’s interests in the writings of Etel Adnan, the coming present and the personal as political.
Tender Point Ruin
Director
An exquisite corpse, the film extends the artist’s interests in the writings of Etel Adnan, the coming present and the personal as political.
Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light
Writer
My Blackest self, whose whitest death, is luxury. I am no stranger anymore. The world is love to me.
Beast Type Song
Director
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.
D0vedown
Director
Though only the recipient can fully decode this video love letter, it is general enough to be read as a universal love poem.
Not Really in Reality Reality TV
Director
A surreal interview with Chinese-American actress Bai Ling, cast as a 'love goddess' and speaking on the subject of vengefulness.
Fatima al Qadiri: Spiral ft. Bobo Secret
Director
A belly dance-off mixing femme and masc in a sensual homage to the form.
Mothership
Director
A baby bird moves in the sand, watched by a mysterious stranger,
Wayuu Creation Myth
Director
A companion piece to The Magical State, Ziruma reveals the bloody Wayuu cosmogony.
The Magical State
Director
A Wayuu woman is possessed by a 40 million-year-old oil demon.
Black Friday
Director
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.
The Future Was Desert (Part II)
Director
'Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.' - J.G. Ballard
Slaughter
Director
Rushes of the 2012 Eid al-Adha slaughter shot for the climax of the abandoned feature film Beretta.
The Future Was Desert
Director
‘Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.’ – J.G. Ballard