At the centre of Chameleon, Monira Al Qadiri’s major exhibition at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, two monumental Murex shells are suspended in a womb of saturated red. Seemingly hollow, like the fossils of an otherworldly sea, the shells begin to reveal life, emitting whispers of their emergent transformation. This is Gastromancer (2023), an installation animating the invisible legacies of the oil industry.

Monira Al Qadiri, a Kuwaiti interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, film and performance, creates landscapes where the logic of capitalistic extraction is denaturalised, and unseen narratives take precedence through tragic, and often playful, means. Her practice is grounded in a long-term investigation into the emotional and symbolic dimensions of ‘petrocultures’ - a term that encompasses the social imaginaries shaped by the global consumption of, and subsequent dependence on, oil.

As curator and collaborator Amal Khalaf observes, Al Qadiri’s work constitutes a ‘cosmos’ of shifting identities in which predetermined boundaries between the social, ideological and aesthetic are constantly mutating, making visible the disorientation of a world transformed by this elusive, permeating substance, and opening up the possibility of imagining beyond its domination.

‍Gastromancer emerges within this cosmos as a striking culmination of Al Qadiri’s research. At once intimate and haunting, the work is a stage set for the affectual, our attention directed towards the emotional interiors of these beings. The dialogue between the shells drifts in soft ambiguity, caught between ecstasy and mystification. Adapted from The Diesel (1994), a novel by Emirati writer Thani Al-Suwaidi, their words reference the lyrical voice of the book’s protagonist, a non-binary performer navigating a Gulf society being transformed by petroleum.

^{Monira Al Qadiri, Gastromancer Installation view of Haunted Water 2023. Photo: Sun Shi courtesy UCCA Center for Contemporary Art.}

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For Al Qadiri, the Murex are symbolic emblems in the continuum of extraction. In the late 19th century, at a time of Western imperial expansion, a British company sent the first oil tanker through the Suez Canal. The vessel was named the SS Murex, a reference to the previous iteration of the business in which seashells were extracted, largely from the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and sold as decorative ornaments. Nearly a century later in the 1980s, scientists discovered that tributyltin (TBT), a red paint used on contemporary oil tankers to prevent the build up of molluscs, caused female gastropods like the Murex to develop male biological characteristics, rendering them infertile and leading to population collapse. 

Across these centuries, the Murex have been intertwined with the forces of extraction. The image of a shell, though not the Murex itself, has even become synonymous with one of the world’s biggest oil corporations. Al Qadiri reflects this myriad of histories, yet does so through imbuing these creatures with a complex subjectivity. Beyond the perception of these beings as ornaments or casualties of industry, Al Qadiri speculates on what we might hear if the Murex could tell us their own story. Here, the inert becomes animate, the so-called object becomes subject.

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‘I have this hybridised way of making art that you can see in many of my works. On the surface, they have this cartoon-like, fun quality, but when you understand the concepts behind them, there’s this very heavy and dark literary aspect’. - Monira Al Qadiri

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Gastromancer, though a central presence in Chameleon, is just one world of many that can be found across the exhibition. Yet what remains everpresent is how Al Qadiri works to illuminate what lies beyond the threshold of established narratives: Most prominently, the affective environments behind petrocultures and the residues of fading cultural memory. Her works are rarely static, they speak, sing or reflect iridescent colours that transform with movement. They entice us with a whimsical facade, soon revealing their ominous complexity. ‘I have this hybridised way of making art that you can see in many of my works,’ she notes. ‘On the surface, they have this cartoon-like, fun quality, but when you understand the concepts behind them, there’s this very heavy and dark literary aspect’.

In many ways, Al Qadiri mimics the imaginaries that surround oil. She often characterises oil as a seducer, which she describes ‘tricks us into believing that it is producing wealth and convenience, but at the same time it’s destroying us’. This duplicity finds vivid form in ORBIT 1-6, a series of six iridescent sculptures which levitate in the sky like organisms or alien technologies. Their surfaces reveal dazzling spectrums of colour, luring the eye before revealing their true source: They are modelled on the heads of oil drills, the little-seen tools of destructive extraction reimagined as wondrous artefacts.

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‘[Oil] tricks us into believing that it is producing wealth and convenience, but at the same time it’s destroying us’ - Monira Al Qadiri

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^{Monira Al Qadiri, Benzene Float(series) 2023 Kunsthaus Bregenz. Photo: Markus Tretter}

For Al Qadiri, hybridity is a methodology where symbolic irony, caricature and concealment are co-conspiratorial agents. The histories she draws upon are re-staged so that their presence is experienced sensuously rather than didactically explained, where unexpected subjects speak on their own terms through speculative imagination. What emerges is a cosmos of kaleidoscopic reflection in which the stories once overlooked exert their quiet force in the present. In this way, her practice itself becomes a chameleonic character: Adapting and shifting in response to its surroundings, yet always revealing, if only briefly, what dominant histories and hegemonies work to obscure. This chameleonic quality mirrors the very infrastructures of the oil industry, which conceals its destruction behind a surface of spectacle and allure. Al Qadiri turns that same mutability into a strategy in which the invisible makes itself known.

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References 

Global South Studies, ‘Petrocultures’ accessed 11.08.25
Amal Khalaf ‘Sad-Boy Cosmos’ in Monira Al Qadiri: Mutant Passages, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2023
Le Grand Tour, ‘Monira Al Qadiri: Gastromancer’ accessed 11/08/2025 
Interview with Monira Al Qadiri & ARKEN, 2025