The air is filled with gigantic shimmering forms, motionless yet bursting with energy. As we move around them, their surfaces shift in the changing light, revealing the spectrum of their colours. They are enormous iridescent jewels in which reflections become otherworldly.
Oil is everywhere: in your phone and your cosmetics, in the fuel tank of a jet, in the children’s plastic lunch box, in your new shoes − even in your chewing gum. Petrochemicals, converted from oil, saturate our contemporary life through global industry, transportation and heating. What will a future without this peculiar liquid drawn from deep within the Earth’s crust be like?
Starting from 13.11.25, ARKEN will present a major exhibition with Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri, who will install works throughout ARKEN’s Art Axis: Floating sculptures shaped like petrochemical molecules, pearlescent, levitating drill heads and a video work where we see an oil refinery through the imagination of a child.
Al Qadiri (b. 1983) was raised in Kuwait, where in one generation the main industry has changed from pearl fishing to oil-drilling. In her art, she merges ancient mythology with a vivid futurism − consistently questioning the normalisation of resource-extraction for profit and ‘petroculture’. Al Qadiri creates a cosmos of many worlds and contradictions. Hostile, powerful oil drills become beautiful, dreamlike technologies in Future Past 3 and Alien Technology (Diamond) – pointing towards the sky instead of reaching into the earth. Whilst in Gastromancer, a pair of murex seashells float in a red atmosphere, contemplating both the ecstasy and melancholy of their biological transition in a contaminated environment.
With whimsical humour, Al Qadiri often plays with scale to highlight the significance of her subject matter. In the series BENZENE FLOAT, she transforms petrochemical molecules into monumental structures. In the video work Crude Eye, she shrinks a colossal oil refinery to the size of a miniature model. Al Qadiri animates the invisible forces behind our current world order with playfulness and irony. What if the dinosaurs fossilised in petroleum millions of years ago began singing back to us? What if an oil refinery was actually a city of beings from other worlds? Most importantly she asks: What stories will we tell in the aftermath of oil?
Press release from ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art
Image: Monira Al Qadiri. Installation view of Chameleon at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, 2025. Photography by Anders Sune Berg. Image courtesy of the artist and ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art
