Sophia Al-Maria

Remixing the collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Tiger Strike Red is an oneiric jaunt through an alternative art history that finds playful linkages between classical marble sculpture, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, representations of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes, AI art, and an 18th-century South Indian automaton depicting a tiger mauling a British colonial soldier.

My Blackest self, whose whitest death, is luxury. I am no stranger anymore. The world is love to me.

An exquisite corpse, the film extends the artist’s interests in the writings of Etel Adnan, the coming present and the personal as political.

Etel Adnan's poem 'The Arab Apocalypse' from 1989 describes a future world in a state of emergency. The poem is the suggestive science fiction backdrop of Sophia Al-Maria's performative video work 'Beast Type Song', which is set in the abandoned space that previously housed Saint Martin's School of Art in London.

We arrive with New York heiress Lucy Savage fresh off the transatlantic steamer and ready for love and marriage in exotic climes. But when her husband Hugo does not receive her in the way she expected, she spins off into the surprising, diverse and degenerate world of Tangier in 1955.

A surreal interview with Chinese-American actress Bai Ling, cast as a 'love goddess' and speaking on the subject of vengefulness.

Though only the recipient can fully decode this video love letter, it is general enough to be read as a universal love poem.

A Wayuu woman is possessed by a 40 million-year-old oil demon.

A baby bird moves in the sand, watched by a mysterious stranger,

A belly dance-off mixing femme and masc in a sensual homage to the form.

A companion piece to The Magical State, Ziruma reveals the bloody Wayuu cosmogony.

'Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.' - J.G. Ballard

Black Friday presents a hypnotic rendering of two large shopping malls in Doha that become a sacred sanctuary where the two protagonists, the artist and her sister, both wearing abayas, walk up and down endless escalators, in a sort of relentless procession inside immense empty and opulent marble-clad spaces. The title of the work refers to the Americanization of local customs: Black Friday, a day of unbridled shopping, is now widespread around the world. The final scene depicts the two women exhausted, stretched out on the sumptuous marble floor, representing the despair of mass consumerism.

Rushes of the 2012 Eid al-Adha slaughter shot for the climax of the abandoned feature film Beretta.

‘Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.’ – J.G. Ballard