Monira Al Qadiri

Monira Al Qadiri is a Kuwaiti artist born in 1983 in Dakar, Senegal, her family later settling in Kuwait. She moved to Japan at sixteen, studying there for a decade and earning a PhD in Intermedia Art from Tokyo University of the Arts; she is now based in Berlin. Working across video, sculpture, installation and performance, she links the iridescence of pearls, her grandfather's pearl-diving songs, and the sheen of petroleum to trace Gulf petro-culture and vanishing cultural memory. In 2013 she co-founded the Gulf art collective GCC with her sister Fatima Al Qadiri and others.