MENDEEL UM A7MAD (NxIxSxM) is a film and sculpture installation by New York-based artists Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid al Gharaballi. The Arab Fund for Art and Culture (AFAC) grant-winning project presents the tissue box as an unlikely Kuwaiti national icon. A film was projected inside a monumental tissue box--created in collaboration with Kuwait-based designers Aziz Alqatami and Nanu Al-Hamad. The film aims to create a representation of the Chai Dhaha ritual, a traditional female forum, using an all-male cast in homage to Abdul Aziz Al-Nimish--an actor who pioneered gender role reversal in Kuwaiti theatre.

 

In MENDEEL UM A7MAD (NxIxSxM), the Chai Dhaha ritual is set out-of-context, in a wedding ballroom to illustrate the absurd spatial conditions of post-oil boom Kuwaiti interior aesthetics, where designing to human scale took a backseat to supersized ostentation. The tissue box sculpture acts as a displaced, large-scale replica of an actual box featured in the film--a sixth "character," performance instigator and voyeur/witness.

 

Khalid al Gharaballi is an artist and stylist based in New York. He has exhibited at Third Line Gallery, Envoy Enterprises and Sultan Gallery, and performed at Art Dubai and the Performa Biennial in New York. His work has been published in Vogue Homme Japan, V magazine, Tokion Magazine, GQ and PIN-UP Magazine. Khalid is a contributor to Bidoun Magazine and DIS Magazine.

 

Fatima Al Qadiri is an artist and musician based in New York. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Modern (part of K48 Kontinuum), MoMA PS1, the 4th Gwangju Design Biennial, Art Dubai, Performa Biennial and The Third Line. Al Qadiri is a contributing editor at DIS Magazine and contributor to Bidoun magazine. She produces music under her name and as Ayshay.

 

Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid al Gharaballi

MENDEEL UM A7MAD (NxIxSxM)

2012

Multimedia installation

HDTV 1080i (16:9), 15:30 minutes

 

 

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