Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday

Featuring a new video and installation, Sophia Al-Maria: Black Friday debuts at the Whitney Museum of American Art on July 26, 2016. The work, made on the occasion of the exhibition, will be shown in the first-floor John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Gallery. On view through October 31, 2016, Black Friday is Sophia Al Maria’s first solo show in the United States.

For nearly a decade, Al Maria has been finding ways to describe twenty-first century life in the Gulf Arab nations through art, writing and filmmaking. She coined the term “Gulf Futurism” to explain the stunning urban and economic development of the Gulf Arab nations over the last decades, as well as the environmental damage, religious conservatism, and historical amnesia that have accompanied it. Her exhibition at the Whitney continues this examination by focusing on the Gulf’s embrace of the shopping mall.

In Al Maria’s view, the mall in both the Gulf and the United States – along with its attendant consumerism – occupies “a weirdly neutral shared zone between cultures that are otherwise engaged in a sort of war of information and image,” waged through both traditional and social media. The proliferation of malls in the Gulf in the late 1990s and early 2000s is something Al Maria witnessed firsthand, having been raised between Washington State and Qatar. Her new video, Black Friday, is a rumination on shopping malls everywhere as secular temples of capitalism. Beneath the projected video lies The Litany, an installation of flickering electronic devices displaying short, glitchy loops – a heap of old screens that acts as a coded history of consumption, conflict, and desire.