Sophia Al-Maria

Sophia Al Maria is an artist, writer and filmmaker. She studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, and aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. For the past few years, she has been carrying out research around the concept of Gulf Futurism. Her primary interests are around the isolation of individuals via technology and reactionary Islam, the corrosive elements of consumerism and industry, and the erasure of history and the blinding approach of a future no one is ready for. She explores these ideas with certain guidebooks and ideas including, but not limited to, Zizek’s The Desert of the Unreal, As-Sufi’s Islamic Book of the Dead, as well as imagery from Islamic eschatology, post humanism and the global mythos of Science Fiction.

Works

Tender Point Ruin

An exquisite corpse, the film extends the artist’s interests in the writings of Etel Adnan, the coming present and the personal as political.

Release Date2021-09-10

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd

The Future Was Desert (Part II)

'Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.' - J.G. Ballard

Release Date2016-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

A Whale Is A Whale Is A Whale

A tribute to the disappearing Arabian humpback whale population, tracing its near extinction as a consequence of the high-speed development of the Persian Gulf.

Release Date2014-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Not Really in Reality Reality TV

A surreal interview with Chinese-American actress Bai Ling, cast as a 'love goddess' and speaking on the subject of vengefulness.

Release Date2018-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

The Future Was Desert

‘Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.’ – J.G. Ballard

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Mirror Cookie

Al-Maria’s Mirror Cookie installation presents an intentionally disjointed monologue that references a self-help technique known as “mirror work.” It gradually develops into an impassioned improvisation delivered directly to the camera, as if the fourth wall she’s breaking is a reflection. As Bai Lings writes in one of her cookies, “We are our own mirror, reflecting the lights within.”

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

The Magical State

A Wayuu woman is possessed by a 40 million-year-old oil demon.

Release Date2017-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Little Birds

We arrive with New York heiress Lucy Savage fresh off the transatlantic steamer and ready for love and marriage in exotic climes. But when her husband Hugo does not receive her in the way she expected, she spins off into the surprising, diverse and degenerate world of Tangier in 1955.

Release Date2020-08-04

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Episode Count6

Vote Count124

Peculiar Contrast, Perfect Light

My Blackest self, whose whitest death, is luxury. I am no stranger anymore. The world is love to me.

Release Date2021-01-21

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Wayuu Creation Myth

A companion piece to The Magical State, Ziruma reveals the bloody Wayuu cosmogony.

Release Date2017-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Vote Count1

D0vedown

Though only the recipient can fully decode this video love letter, it is general enough to be read as a universal love poem.

Release Date2018-09-22

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Mothership

A baby bird moves in the sand, watched by a mysterious stranger,

Release Date2017-11-07

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Slaughter

Rushes of the 2012 Eid al-Adha slaughter shot for the climax of the abandoned feature film Beretta.

Release Date2013-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Black Friday

Black Friday presents a hypnotic rendering of two large shopping malls in Doha that become a sacred sanctuary where the two protagonists, the artist and her sister, both wearing abayas, walk up and down endless escalators, in a sort of relentless procession inside immense empty and opulent marble-clad spaces. The title of the work refers to the Americanization of local customs: Black Friday, a day of unbridled shopping, is now widespread around the world. The final scene depicts the two women exhausted, stretched out on the sumptuous marble floor, representing the despair of mass consumerism.

Release Date2016-07-14

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

MOBY DICK; or, The Whale

An adaptation of Moby Dick as a silent film and theatre piece with a postcolonial and queer reading that highlights its marginal characters.

Release Date2022-11-27

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Tiger Strike Red

Remixing the collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Tiger Strike Red is an oneiric jaunt through an alternative art history that finds playful linkages between classical marble sculpture, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, representations of Judith’s beheading of Holofernes, AI art, and an 18th-century South Indian automaton depicting a tiger mauling a British colonial soldier.

Release Date2022-09-14

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Beast Type Song

Etel Adnan's poem 'The Arab Apocalypse' from 1989 describes a future world in a state of emergency. The poem is the suggestive science fiction backdrop of Sophia Al-Maria's performative video work 'Beast Type Song', which is set in the abandoned space that previously housed Saint Martin's School of Art in London.

Release Date2020-03-18

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Le Radeau de la Méduse

DepartmentWriting

JobScreenplay

Fatima al Qadiri: Spiral ft. Bobo Secret

A belly dance-off mixing femme and masc in a sensual homage to the form.

Release Date2017-11-20

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector