At the beginning of the short film the artist/narrator reflects upon growing up in Senegal (her father was a Kuwaiti diplomat), and how she came to believe the world to be infiltrated by aliens and her parents as accomplices with the alien plot to take over the world: “where embassy buildings were actually extra-terrestrial spaceships and landing pods.” This belief was informed by a childhood UFO sighting when her mother and sister entered the spaceship, which the sister later described as looking just like an American ­style diner and the aliens casually conversing with humans: “as though they had developed long relationships over time”. The First Gulf War, which aliens “tried desperately to make look like a human conflict,” only strengthened the belief that the world was infiltrated by aliens: flashing lights in the night sky are alien spaceships. And the military? “We knew those soldiers weren’t human,” the narrator confirms.

Through the film as the protagonist questions reality, one also begins to question current political and cultural realities with a general sense of distrust, overshadowing everything, particularly when considering the current rise of nationalism and political populism. The film’s microcosm can also be interpreted as a consideration of the larger impact of American political power and its expression via American popular culture, not only as a critique but also as a revaluation of our complicity within it, and its impact to our own cultural belonging. When talking about the short film Al Qadiri refers to her own experience attending a British school in Kuwait. Al Qadiri says: “We were actually called ‘chicken nuggets’. This was our name. We were brown on the outside, white on the inside. We’re very westernised. We speak English better than Arabic.” As part of this acculturation processes we become aliens within our own culture. This conflicted otherness is a reflection of today’s “liquid” society, boundaries and limits are shifting or disorienting: belonging to no place, not knowing where ‘home’ is, underlines the sense of uncertainty and in-betweenness experienced by people.

The Craft (2017) Click here to read the English script with timestamps

Monira Al Qadiri
VHS video
Duration: 16:00

Co-commissioned by Gasworks and the Sursock Museum. Courtesy of the artist.

Monira Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti visual artist born in Senegal and educated in Japan. In 2010, she received a Ph.D. in inter-media art from Tokyo University of the Arts, where her research was focused on the aesthetics of sadness in the Middle-East stemming from poetry, music, art and religious practices. Her work explores unconventional gender identities, petro-cultures and their possible futures, as well as the legacies of corruption. She is currently based in Berlin.

Interview | ‘Remembering The Future: An Interview with Monira Al Qadiri’, by Robert Barry, The Quietus, July 2017.

Review | ‘The Craft’, by Rebecca Bligh, Map Magazine, August 2017.

Review | ‘Critic’s Guide: London – The Craft’, by Orit Gat, Frieze Magazine, July 2017.

Review | ‘Monira Al Qadiri: The Craft’, by Michaela Bear, Trebuchet, August 2017.

Image: Monira Al Qadiri, The Craft (2017) film still. VHS video. Duration: 16:00