Sophia Al Maria, still from Black Friday, 2016. Digital video projected vertically, color, sound; 16:36 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy Anna Lena Films, Paris, and The Third Line, Dubai

For her first solo exhibition “Black Friday” in the United States, Sophia Al-Maria (b. 1983) debuts a new video and installation at Whitney Museum of American Art till October 31st. For nearly a decade, Al-Maria has been finding ways to describe twenty-first-century life in the Gulf Arab nations through art, writing, and filmmaking.

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She coined the term “Gulf Futurism” to explain the stunning urban and economic development in the region over the last decades, as well as the environmental damage, religious conservatism, and historical amnesia that have accompanied it.

Her exhibition at the Whitney continues this examination by focusing on the Gulf’s embrace of the shopping mall. The proliferation of malls in the Gulf in the late 1990s and early 2000s is something Al-Maria witnessed firsthand, having been raised between Washington State and Qatar. Her new video “Black Friday” is a rumination on shopping malls everywhere as secular temples of capitalism.

Sophia Al-Maria “Black Friday”
Date: July 26th – October 31st, 2016
Open: 11:00 – 18:00 (Friday 13:00 – 21:00)

Closed on Monday and Tuesday
Place: Whitney Museum of American Art
Address: 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014
Admission: 18$
Tel: +1 212 570 3600
http://whitney.org