In The Archaeology of Beasts, Monira Al Qadiri’s solo exhibition at Bozar (Centre for Fine Arts of Brussels), the artist brings Ancient Egypt into the modern day in a series of cross-media installations that meditate on the value of looking beyond the material world.
Two deities have alighted in Brussels. They stand on elaborate plinths beneath a gilded dome. One is the ram-headed Khnum, the Ancient Egyptian fertility god who moulded life on Earth from clay; his companion is Anubis, guide to the dead and protector of graves. The pair rotate quietly like vast kebabs. Their bodies are gym-honed to perfection – they would be Instagram-ready hunks if not for their bestial heads. Both are made from fibreglass and coated in slick black automobile paint, giving them a sheen of luxury. They might represent religion as an aspirational product, spirituality as an accessory to our materialistic lives.
This is Automaton (2024), by the Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri. It serves as the gatekeeper for The Archaeology of Beasts, her exhibition at Bozar, the Centre for Fine Arts of Brussels. The show and the work within it represent both a continuance and a departure from her practice to date, in which Al Qadiri dances across media, including sculpture, video and performance. Some of her works have an almost cartoonish quality: Seismic Songs (2022) comprises a purple T-Rex sitting down to sing karaoke, while other sculptures feature luridly coloured mechanical and biomorphic forms. Al Qadiri often scrutinises the politics and society of her native Kuwait, particularly its dependence on oil. The film Rumours of Affluence (2012) was set in the country’s stock exchange and looks at the influence of rumour, while Tetrakis (2024) is a collection of inflatable sculptures based on the molecular structure of petrochemicals.
The Archaeology of Beasts shifts Al Qadiri’s gaze to Ancient Egypt, while continuing her multimedia variousness and concern with contemporary issues such as climate change and commodity culture. Three of the four works plunge the viewer into immersive environments, making the exhibition feel more expansive than its parts. The eponymous piece (2024) is a 4-channel video installation that clothes an entire room. Hundreds of souvenirs from Luxor are heaped up against a black background, haphazardly arranged as if to highlight their disposability. These imitation artefacts spin around the wall. On the one hand, Al Qadiri appears to pinpoint our transactional relationship to heritage. One object, a green figurine of a moustachioed man, shakes as if aiming to stand out from the crowd. A culture’s sacred images are reduced to tat jostling for our coin, yet this gallery of heterogeneous forms might also stand for humanity in all its diversity. These mismatching humanoids might be pleading for empathy and attention.
Aaru: After Lament (2024), Al Qadiri’s first virtual reality work, has a more contemplative tone. It is named for the Field of Reeds, a heavenly paradise in Ancient Egyptian mythology that takes the form of meadows spread over islands, an endless Nile Delta. The dead could continue to farm eternally – a very different afterlife to the eternal rest promised by modern religions. Aaru places us within this domain, where agricultural labour imparts status and dignity rather than being devalued as it often is today. A handful of people work in the reeds. Tranquility reigns, aided by a soundtrack by Al Qadiri’s sister, Fatima. Then two omens float across the sky: the sun god Ra’s solar barque and the Heavenly Cow, whom Ra sent to punish rebellious humans and bring death into the world. The land floods, the farmers vanish and darkness falls. Is this paradise lost a harbinger of our own fate? Al Qadiri makes little explicit, but her work is freighted with a sense of impending doom.
The VR experience hardware is situated within a room hung with gold-painted stems of wheat against a black painted wall. Their seedheads appear to be almost reaching across this dark gulf, growing downwards as if in a world flipped on its head. Each stem represents the soul of a departed person. Here Al Qadiri points to the interconnectedness of human life and the world’s ecosystems. Are these stems really that far from us? As with the animal-headed gods of Automaton, Al Qadiri effaces the barrier between mankind and other forms of life.
The divine also appears in Book of the Dead (2024), a 3-channel video installation in which a shifting cast of gods appear to discourse. These characters, created by 3D scanning statues in Luxor, recite excerpts from the Book of the Dead, a collection of spells to guide us through the afterlife. Al Qadiri’s scenography is striking. We approach these gods at the end of a darkened corridor, as if descending into a tomb or passing into a darkness after death. The speeches themselves sometimes deflate this solemnity. “I am the great and mighty fish-like being who is in the bitter lakes,” says the crocodile god Sobek. There is something of the role-playing video game about these static characters with uncannily animated mouths, dispensing gnomic wisdom. Yet Al Qadiri’s message that we should focus on the world beyond humanity shines through.
