Building Monuments to the End of Oil

“I'm making art about the end of oil in a country that would not be able to survive without it,” says Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri on the Zero podcast

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(Bloomberg) — Monira Al Qadiri says she is pre-empting the end of oil and building monuments to it. As one of the most important contemporary artists of the Middle East, her work — spanning sculptures, films and performances — throws new light on humanity’s deep interdependent relationship with fossil fuels. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi asks Al Qadiri how art can help make sense of the current moment.

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Akshat Rathi  0:00  

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Welcome to Zero, I’m Akshat Rathi. This week: art and oil.

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Akshat Rathi  0:16  

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A few weeks ago, I was in Helsinki for vacation, and I stumbled across an exhibition by an artist named Monira Al Qadiri. The exhibition was titled Deep Fate, referring to the origins of oil, which comes from deep inside the earth, but also to how our fate is dependent on oil and how we break away from our dependence on oil. 

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Monira is a Kuwaiti visual artist who was born in Senegal, grew up in Kuwait and studied art in Japan. She’s combined influences from all those cultures, but focused her attention on the Gulf region and its intimate relationship to oil. In Monira’s own words, she is trying to “pre-empt the end of oil by creating monuments and mythologies around it”. I was fascinated by the exhibition, partly also because she made chemistry look interesting and beautiful and strange, which I hadn’t seen before. So I wanted to have her on the show and ask her how she thinks about the interrelationship between art, climate and fossil fuels.

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Akshat Rathi  1:21  

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Monira, welcome to the show. 

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Monira Al Qadiri  1:23

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Hello. Thanks for having me. 

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Akshat Rathi  1:26  

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A few weeks ago, I was in Helsinki for vacation, and I came across your exhibition in Kiasma, which is one of the city’s top contemporary art museums, and it left a strong impression on me. And I’d like to touch on the exhibition, your work, how you came to do what you do. But before we start, let me ask you a big question, what in your view, is a point of art?

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Monira Al Qadiri  1:47  

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Well, I was underground in a tomb in Egypt last year, and I was looking at all these paintings that are like 5,000 years old, and it felt like they were painted yesterday, you know. And I was reminded, in that moment, why people make art. It’s the only thing that remains. Everything else disappears, civilizations come and go, but art is still there, thousands of years later, it’s amazing. And it’s almost like a time machine. You can access different worlds and times. And maybe not, I mean, maybe you won’t know what it is anymore after hundreds of years, but it’s there.

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Akshat Rathi  2:30  

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Now, the Helsinki exhibition itself features many years of your work. It’s called Deep Fate and oil extraction, creation and destruction are the themes that run through your work. Could you tell us your story and why you ended up working on art that is linked to oil extraction?

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Monira Al Qadiri  3:02  

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So I’m from Kuwait, which is a country that has been heavily dependent on oil revenue since, I would say, the 1950s. And as someone from there, growing up in that place, you’re kind of shielded from this subject. You don’t really realize or notice it’s there, except when you go outside of it. But I lived through the Gulf War in Kuwait in 1990 and 91 as a child, and it was primarily a war that started because of oil. 700 oil wells were lit on fire at the end of the war and we lived basically in an oil covered reality. I mean, it was raining black oil, our house was black. The Earth was black. The sea was full of oil. And I think that was the first time I actually saw this stuff, and I confronted it for the first time, and since then, it’s never left my mind. I always think of it like, almost like a genie or an alien or a monster that has invaded our world and refuses to leave.

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Akshat Rathi  4:07  

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You also lived in many parts of the world, and a lot of your art is informed by the cultures that you’ve lived in. Maybe let’s explore them through some of your artworks. And perhaps the most relevant one to start with, and one I found gripping when I was in Helsinki in Kiasma, sitting on a bench looking at a TV screen, was this piece called Behind The Sun? Could you describe what the work is?

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Monira Al Qadiri  4:32  

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So actually, the work is about that moment that I just described. It’s a collection of amateur videos of burning oil from Kuwait from 1991 and I really wanted to revisit that moment in my life, because it really has shaped me as a person. Strangely enough, there was a film by Werner Herzog right after the war, where he came to Kuwait and filmed the burning oil called Lessons of Darkness. And he basically was filming it from a helicopter with this very kind of extravagant Wagner soundtrack. And it’s a docu-fiction film, so he would narrate these excerpts from the Bible about Armageddon and things like that, and combine it with this footage. And as a child watching that film, I didn’t understand it. I almost thought, why is this German man lying about our war? What’s going on here? I didn’t understand the concept of docufiction. But, of course, I grew older, and then I went to art school, and I saw all of Werner Herzog’s films, and I was… I love his work, obviously, but there was something in me whenever I watched that film that turns back into a seven year old child who cannot forgive him, right? So I thought I should make my own version of it, and something that is taken from the ground with a kind of cultural context that fits the place, which is Muslim, Islamic culture. And so I combined these amateur videos of the burning oil with excerpts from Islamic television programs about the beauty of the Divine and heaven and things like this in nature. And I combined that actually with those images, because it’s strange what we consider as sublime. As a kid, seeing oil burning in front of me, I was also mesmerized by it. You cannot help, I think, as a person, to be not amazed even by images of destruction that you see in front of you. It can be so overwhelming that it becomes kind of a sublime image. And I wanted to revisit that conundrum that I have. I don’t really know how to deal with it.

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Akshat Rathi  6:50  

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And it was also one of the first wars to be live broadcast on TV. And you know, so many people saw those images of oil wells being lit on this vast landscape, flat land with big plumes of black. So I was stunned to learn that you met some people who claimed that the images of oil soaked animals were faked, were war propaganda. This is only from 1990, it’s odd to say now, 35 years on, but today, reality is even getting harder to hold onto. We live in times when hard truths are being questioned, when many are twisting facts to benefit themselves or turning them into complete fiction. When you were faced with this kind of mistelling of history, you created art. Could you describe the work titled Onus?

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Monira Al Qadiri  7:45  

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Yes. So Onus is actually a work that took many years, actually, to make either of these works. You know, it’s like a long kind of process of digesting what happened to me in my life and when I was an art student. I studied in Japan, in Tokyo, and we were in this advertising class at art school, and the Professor just pulled out a picture of an oil covered bird from Kuwait, from the war, and he proceeded on this tirade of explaining to us how this photo was staged and that none of this ever happened, and you know it because I was so shocked. And my peers were all believing him, right? They had no other point of reference. And I was so shocked that I really lost my ability to say anything. But this sense of shock never left me, and I thought about it for so many years, that over distances in time and images and spaces and media, that reality can be so distorted. And also that sometimes images are so harsh and difficult to digest that people don’t want to believe them, right? There’s also this desire of not wanting to know, not wanting to believe that this horrible thing happened. And so I turned this experience into a work called Onus, which is an installation of about 50 glass birds covered in oil. They look like they’re covered in oil, but they’re made of glass, black glass. And the idea to make them out of glass was to also think about, I wanted to revisit that moment and recreate it in the sculptural form, but at the same time, I wanted to show that human memory is also very fragile, like glass, and malleable. If someone tells you many times over that the thing you actually saw and experienced is not real, you also start to doubt it. And that’s the amazing part about brainwashing and human persuasion,

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Akshat Rathi  10:02  

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And people have used it so effectively, and I think we are getting tools in the modern world that are making it easier and easier to be effective at creating your own reality. What do you think people can learn from art about living in a world where this tide of misinformation is only likely to rise?

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Monira Al Qadiri  10:23  

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Art is really a reflection of the times, right? We really live in this post truth world. And I think a lot of art also reflects that idea. But my work has a lot of political and, let’s say, ecological subjects, but at the same time, I see it as an exercise in emotion. The post truth world that we do live in, everybody’s pulling your heart strings in different directions. It’s really about emotions and how to manipulate emotions. I feel like it’s interesting to me, how art also is doing that for people. We also try to guide people into seeing different aspects of life, but I think it’s important. Not all art is moral as well, right? There’s also artists who want to deceive and cheat, and this is fine. It’s the same as any other kind of human endeavor.

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Akshat Rathi  11:24  

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Well, one of the things in that Helsinki exhibition that also surprised me, you know, I’ve covered climate and energy for a while, and oil is something that I have to cover, because there is no way to escape it when you’re covering these topics. And yet, until I saw your work, I actually hadn’t seen what an oil drilling equipment looks like and how odd and strange and beautiful it is. Could you describe the work titled Choreography of Alien Technology?

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Monira Al Qadiri  11:56  

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Choreography of Alien Technology is really a continuation of a series of works I’ve worked on for the past 10 years  around this idea of the inner mechanics of the oil industry. Because, as someone from Kuwait, I was shocked that I don’t know anything about how this industry operates, right? It’s the source, the only source, of our wealth. And nobody knows how it functions. And so I was amazed at the time when I was researching these things, and I discovered oil drills. I mean, they look phantasmagorical, like marine creatures covered in gold and diamonds to be able to drill better. And I was really amazed, first from their shapes and forms, but also, strangely enough, their beauty. There is something quite beautiful about them. And so I started recreating them in different scales, but also I would cover them in this iridescent color scheme, which I took from the color of oil itself. Actually, if you spill it on the side of the road, it has this beautiful rainbow sheen to it. But I also tried to link that to the history before oil in Kuwait, which, according to some accounts, was pearl diving for about 2,000 years. And pearls also have this very beautiful, shimmering, kind of iridescent color. So my whole practice started revolving around this color, as the color of history. It’s the color of the past, the color of the present, which is oil, but also maybe after oil, it will become something else. So the idea is that this trickery, that this iridescence causes, because you can never see the same color twice, is really kind of integral to my practice. And so I make these giant drills as well that rotate and also levitate in space. Instead of drilling the ground, they’re drilling the air or the sky, and they have these very magical colors. The idea is that they are also a self portrait. I feel I am a freak of this generation, which is the post oil generation in the Gulf, and I don’t think it’s going to last very long. So I am also kind of eulogizing it, memorializing it through these forms, in a way that maybe 100 years from now, when oil is obsolete as a source of fuel, that people will find these works and think that, ‘oh, this time was quite freakish and interesting.’

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Akshat Rathi  14:33  

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Well, I’m a chemist, and I’ve looked at molecules for many years trying to get a PhD, and until I saw your work, where you’d use some of these iridescent colors and ways to make molecules look interesting, molecules that come from oil, I was surprised that you could make something that people work on every day, which is so practical, is so necessary, but also be beautiful and something that you can reflect on. You’ve also used technologies that are being developed by the oil industry, not just molecules, to try and make artwork out of it. Could you tell us about Seismic Songs?

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Monira Al Qadiri  15:13  

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So this was a very interesting work. Basically, it’s a purple dinosaur, a T-rex with a microphone sitting on the floor in front of a screen where you can see, almost like a karaoke text, and there is sound. So the dinosaur is actually singing karaoke and he is singing in auto tune, which is this vocal effect that was developed by an oil engineer. Because in the oil industry, they use a lot of very advanced acoustic technology to find deposits of oil and all of this. And so this engineer apparently was listening to the radio in the 90s and heard that the singer was out of tune, and thought that he could use his know-how to develop a software to tune her voice. And he did. He managed to do it, and he patented the technology. And to this day, auto tune is a subscription, and all of the music industry uses it. So I thought it would be interesting to try to imagine that process in which they say oil is remnants of ancient organisms, maybe dinosaurs. I mean, maybe that’s a myth, but I imagined the dinosaur singing back to the engineer, you know, ‘please find me, find me deep in the earth.’ And singing this in auto tune. So it’s a very comical work, but at the same time, there’s something very tragic about it.

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Akshat Rathi  16:46  

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Join us after the break for more of my conversation with Munira al khadiri, and while I have you, please give Zero a review on Apple podcasts and Spotify, it helps new listeners find the show. Recently, Maracent wrote, ‘love this podcast, smart, full of info, positive and focused on solutions.’ Thank you, Maracent.

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Akshat Rathi  17:20  

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I want to talk a little wider about the implications of the work. So we are now, once again, living through a time of war. Add to it massive political upheaval. Even in peaceful countries, there’s the destabilizing impacts from the harms of climate change. It’s a lot to take in 2025. And there are some people who are trying to develop a response, and I want to pull one of them, which is a strand of thinking that’s taking place in some parts of the left, especially the American left, that’s been labeled as ‘abundance.’ The thinking from their side is that what the left in the past has done, in part, to fight environmental impacts, has made it impossible to build and impossible to enable all people to enjoy the benefits that come from this world of abundance. You’ve lived in Kuwait, you have seen the wider Middle East and how it has experienced abundance in a very short period through the flood of oil and the wealth that came with it. What do you think are the lessons from your exploration of abundance that others should be aware of?

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Monira Al Qadiri  18:33  

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I made a work in 2020 called Holy Quarter, which is a video installation of glass sculptures. And so it’s actually based on a story about an explorer, a British explorer, who went to the desert in the 1930s looking for the Atlantis of the Sands, and all he could find was these little black beads on the ground. And the people there told him that they were pearl necklaces of ladies that used to live in this amazing kingdom, but God punished them because of their decadence, and all of the city burned down, and all that was left was their pearls, their black pearls. And he didn’t believe them, obviously, and took it back with him to the British Museum and discovered that these were actually meteorites from outer space. I thought it was such an interesting story. You know, this idea of, I mean, it’s also a Quranic legend about a people that were too decadent and then they were punished. That’s a little bit, I think what Kuwait went through after the war in 1990 was that a lot of people suddenly became very conservative, very religious, because they believed that we were too ambitious and too flashy and too wealthy that, you know, divine punishment would come to us. I think this kind of thinking is very ancient, actually, it’s not new. People have this idea that if you abuse your wealth and your power, that at some point you will be punished. Is it a divine punishment? Is it an earthly punishment? I also feel our relationship to nature is very much like this. We are abusing it so much to a point that it will become like a ghost in the future that will haunt us forever. It’s not a divine punishment. For me, it’s almost like a horror film that we cannot escape. It’s a zombie that will come back and cause the apocalypse. It’s all of these ideas that we have as humans. It’s really like a process of haunting. And so I’m very interested in this idea, maybe, of not abundance. I mean, my work and my ideas as an artist, I don’t really think are about bettering the world, right? What I’m doing is reflecting, I’m thinking about things, but I’m also showing the status quo. My work is very much an exercise, and also showing people the dystopia that we live in. I wrote a thesis called the Aesthetics of Sadness, which I also believe that there is a way to find beauty and destruction even though we cause it. So I don’t really have this kind of activist bone in me. I’m really a soothsayer, but in a very melancholic, very doomsday kind of sense.

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Akshat Rathi  21:29  

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Well, let’s come to sadness. The title of your PhD thesis was the ‘Aesthetics of Sadness In The Middle East.’ And one of the themes that is impossible to escape as somebody who thinks about climate change is the immense sadness for all the hurt in the world, for all that’s going to be lost, that’s being lost. There are people who are suffering from climate damages. They’re losing their land. They’re losing their culture. There are countless species that are going extinct, some even before we’ve discovered them. Can you talk me through your exploration of sadness?

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Monira Al Qadiri  22:02  

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Human emotion is very varied, right? It’s a whole spectrum, and I feel like the kind of clinical way that kind of the Western world, but especially capitalism, has defined it is that it’s a disease or it’s not worth anything. But sadness has an amazing ability to inform our lives. It was called the noble emotion back in the day. I think it also stems from the climate itself of the desert. You know, it’s such a harsh place to live and so people would wallow in their misery, but also create beautiful art around that. And I think it’s interesting how climate also informs art making. But going to your point, I recently made a very new video film called Oh Body Of Mine, which I filmed in Chittagong in Bangladesh, on a beach where basically oil tankers go to die. It’s where they dump the decommissioned, disused oil tankers. That place really looks like the end of the world, it was so shocking to see. This is really the dark underbelly that nobody wants to look at. Nobody wants to talk about. It’s about the detritus, the leftovers, of this huge industry, right? And how much destruction it has caused to the natural environment, to cities, to the people. I just find it so disturbing. And even for me, it was a discovery. I was like, how many of these exist in the world. It’s just amazing what we’ve managed to do and what we want to also cover up somehow from these activities. Like I said, I really feel like oil is a kind of monster that’s taken over the world, and we don’t really know how to get rid of it. I’m also not going to deny my own personal complicity in it. I think oil has revolutionized the way we live in the modern world. We cannot deny that, right, but at the same time, it’s destroying us. It’s a double edged sword and how do we reconcile these two states together? I really don’t know. I don’t know how to, I don’t have any answers, I’m just reflecting.

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Akshat Rathi  24:19  

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Sticking on sadness, there’s one aspect of it which I think is worth exploring, which is recently, I read the 1932 novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, and in it, he describes this far future where there’s a world state and a global society that has a strict hierarchy, and that hierarchy is maintained by a huge amount of conditioning that is given to different castes as they grow up. Everybody’s happy and the world is completely stable. And when there is any amount of unhappiness or discomfort, people are given a drug called Soma, and they are happy again. You know, it’s labeled as a dystopia, but so much of our reality today, nearly 100 years on, is that. People have been conditioned to run away from sadness, to find dopamine hits in scrolling social media, in getting their heart notifications. What do you think we are missing when we run away from sadness?

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Monira Al Qadiri  25:20  

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I think we are repressing a whole side of our minds. It’s there. It doesn’t disappear. It’s part of our human experience. I feel like we have to find a way to enrich ourselves with it. It’s not wrong, you know? It’s not a negative thing. This is the thing. This is what I feel like, for example, in the Arabian world, but also in Iran and Turkey, there’s a lot of places where this is seen as a beautiful experience. It’s romantic, it’s beautiful, it’s melancholic, it’s also very much, I think, part of the religion as well. I think about religious rituals and how people use it to have cathartic experiences. I think the way we deal with it in our realities is very superficial, and it doesn’t help a lot of people.  I think people need to find solace in it somehow.

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Akshat Rathi  26:21  

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There’s also climate activism that has come to art. There have been protests, things like throwing soup on paintings of huge repute that have then drawn attention to the climate crisis, to the work that the activists do. What do you think about the effectiveness of tactics like these?

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Monira Al Qadiri  26:41  

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I don’t know if it’s effective. I feel like there is this part of society that views art as a decadent activity in itself. You know as an expression of excess, of wealth, of almost evil. And fighting the existence of art itself is a moral activity. And I find that obviously problematic being an artist myself. But I do think that the way that so much value has been attributed to art in terms of monetary value is a detriment to everyone. Before, I think the 1970s there was no art that was worth this kind of money, right? It almost became something like the stock market. You know, a few years ago, we also had artists making NFTs that were basically like stocks. For me, that was a very strange moment, because people kept asking me to do that, and I was like, I’m not a stock broker. I’m not doing this. It’s very interesting how people associate art with all of these societal problems that they’re having, right? But as I said in the beginning of our conversation, art outlives everybody, and nobody will know why we made these things when we did, or if the same artists or the same artworks are even important 50 years from now. Who knows? So for me, it’s interesting. I’m trying to bring into the museum these questions about climate change and oil and petrochemicals that maybe the activists were trying to bring with soup. You know, I’m just doing it in a different way.

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Akshat Rathi  28:33  

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Yeah, I think some of your work also speaks to how art can be inclusive. I heard a story of yours where you describe your grandfather and how he used to sing on boats that went out pearl fishing in Kuwait, and he was a singer, and he was making art to make the work — which is tough and hard and painful — easier. And that he never sang those songs at home, because that art was for a certain purpose, and it wasn’t decadence. It was for being able to survive in that time. But coming back to art and climate activism, another aspect that has come up is that many of the museums around the world are funded by fossil fuel companies. Have you declined commissions or exhibitions or invitations as a result of that? 

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Monira Al Qadiri  29:26  

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Not at all. I actually find it very interesting. It’s kind of going into the belly of the beast, that they are funding this work that disturbs them. I find it really something to behold. And it’s happened many times in my career, actually, sometimes I didn’t even know and then I get there, and then this museum is actually owned by oil conglomerates. I didn’t even know this, and there was a lot of raised eyebrows at the exhibition. And we even had some electrical problems. And I was wondering, like, ‘are the oil Gods mad at me?’ I’m from Kuwait. You know, I’m making work about the end of oil in a country that would not be able to survive without it in its current form, right? So, in a way, it’s an act of self harm. I am trying to predict the collapse of my own country. It’s not a nice predicament to be in, but I think it’s inevitable and I try to show people through these drill bits, or sci-fi visions of an oil refinery, or beach in Bangladesh that this is coming. This collapse is coming, and what parts of our culture and our being and our nation will survive? And they don’t really want to confront this, but that’s where I come from, so I’ve never shied away from it because it’s self-defeating.

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Akshat Rathi  31:00  

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Really, there’s also a flip side to this, which is we are living through a time when freedoms are being curtailed, especially on things you can do. Have you faced censure in doing any of your work?

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Monira Al Qadiri  31:13  

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Oh, yes, many, many, many times. And obviously, I come from a non-democratic society, so I’m very used to it. I think it’s mostly in democratic societies these days that people are finding this to be new and strange and weird, and they’re trying to figure out strategies around it, right? But for me, I have worked strategies around this all my life. This kind of mental gymnastics that I play with my work. Is the work really about this or about that? I don’t know. I can’t tell you, is a strategy I’m used to. So it’s almost like I think I can teach other artists and thinkers abroad what to do in this setting. It’s a very weird situation to be in, but I’m very used to it.

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Akshat Rathi  32:01  

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Are there quick lessons you can give people? Because I feel people would want to know, what are the tricks that you can use?

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Monira Al Qadiri  32:09  

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I think it’s always good to have secrets. As an artist, I make a lot of work, and I don’t tell everybody what it’s really about, and it’s fine that there are mysteries and secrets that other people cannot know. But some people actually guess right. They guess this work is about this, and I tell them, ‘Well, you know, that’s your guess.’ And sometimes the guess is correct. So I do want them to think that maybe this is about this subject. But they don’t have any proof.

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Akshat Rathi  32:44  

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Well, thank you so much for joining zero. This podcast is usually about me asking questions so that people can give us answers and solutions, but your work raises more problems and questions than it answers, and you are proud of that. And I am glad that you were able to come on the show and give us a taste of what it is like to work on what is a topic of our times, a topic that’s going to be relevant for a lot of time. And I hope people go and explore your work wherever they can see it in the world, or on your website, which we will link in the show notes. Thank you, Monira.

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Monira Al Qadiri  33:18  

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Thank you so much for having me.

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Akshat Rathi  33:26  

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Thank you for listening to Zero. If you’re interested in seeing more of Monira’s work, we’ve put a link in the show notes. She’s exhibiting in Berlin from now until August 2026. Now for the sound of the week. That is the sound of an oil well up close. Gross, isn’t it? 

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If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review the show on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with someone who loves auto tune. This episode was produced by Oscar Boyd. Our theme music is composed by Wonderly Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison-Dengate, Sommer Saadi, Mohsis Adam and Sharon Chen. I’m Akshat Rathi. Back soon.

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