Monira Al Qadiri

The visual artist, with roots in Kuwait, Senegal and Japan, creates transcultural visual worlds that are as personal as they are exceptional. Her loaded works are full of emotion and pathos, but simultaneously filled with »mistakes« or breakages pointing to their own contructedness. The surreal music video WA WAILA (Oh Torment) from 2008 is based on an old Kuwaiti folksong whose vocals have a trance-like effect. The piece is about lovesickness, gender roles and death -- stirring, idiosyncratic and with lots of humor. In her lecture, THE BEAUTIFUL SADNESS, Monira Al Qadiri presents the background for her artistic-academic research into the iconography of mourning in the Middle East.