Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri has Devonian on display at the Southbank Centre’s Riverside Terrace, one of London’s most famous locations for the arts. Although amusing, the Kuwaiti artist’s most recent multicoloured sculpture addresses a significant and urgent topic.
To evoke the process by which fossil fuels are generated from the disintegrated remains of ancient species and plankton found at the bottom of the oceans, the piece is based on the bodies of ancient sea creatures and is a shimmering, multicoloured, fossil-like structure.
“Showing my work at the Southbank Centre is such a significant turning point in my artistic career so far, ” says Al Qadiri. “In these changing times, I hope that the general audience that sees my art will find the subject I’m addressing important to think about and contemplate.
In Al Qadiri’s artwork, extinct, alien-looking crabs are rebuilt as a set of graphic motifs on eight distinct aluminium panels connected by a turquoise structure. When Al Qadiri was conceptualising the sculpture, he kept in mind that the shapes and scale of the piece lend themselves to a public setting.
She claims that creating public art is highly tough and specialised, and it differs greatly from exhibiting artwork in a gallery or a museum.
The sculpture’s surface has an oily sheen that is reminiscent of the lustre on pearls. The result enhances the work’s visual experience. It is a commonality in how colour is reflected on both oil and pearls, two things that appear to be in opposition to one another.
A stylistic component present in some of Al Qadiri’s other works is the use of brilliant colour. Through scale and Al Qadiri’s distinctive colour scheme, her sculpture Chimera, a five-meter-tall piece that was included in the Expo 2020 Dubai collection of public artworks, addressed the past and future of the Gulf.