mono.kultur #43 — Fatima Al Qadiri: Embedded Narratives — 柏林 德國

Bending and fusing different genres of music, Al Qadiri has released a handful of largely instrumental albums that often imply narratives wrapped in a dystopian atmosphere, evoking an uncanny imagery of our increasingly oversaturated and disorienting information age. It is a simple yet complicated sound that owes as much to electronic music and video game soundtracks as it does to Russian composers and Arab musical traditions.

With mono.kultur, Fatima Al Qadiri talked about the narratives within her music, the cycles of history, and the soundtrack to burning oil fields. Visually, the issue traces an arc from Fatima Al Qadiri’s youth to her current work. The main imagery comes from her series Bored 1997, for which, at 16, she took photographs of her younger sister Monira dressing up in their father's clothes. The series is published here for the first time in print, interspersed with stills from a current video work on gender reversal and Kuwaiti rituals, inserted as static stickers.