September 18, 2025 • 33 mins
Monira Al Qadiri says she is pre-empting the end of oil and building monuments to it. As one of the most important contemporary artists of the Middle East, her work — spanning sculptures, films and performances — throws new light on humanity’s deep interdependent relationship with fossil fuels. This week on Zero, Akshat Rathi asks Al Qadiri how art can help make sense of the current moment.
Explore further:
- Monira’s website: https://www.moniraalqadiri.com/
- Her exhibit in Berlin: https://berlinischegalerie.de/en/exhibitions/current/monira-al-qadiri/
Zero is a production of Bloomberg Green. Our producer is Oscar Boyd. Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Siobhan Wagner, Sommer Saadi and Mohsis Andam. Thoughts or suggestions? Email us at zeropod@bloomberg.net. For more coverage of climate change and solutions, visit https://www.bloomberg.com/green.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatarati this week Art and Oil.
A few weeks ago, I was in helsinkiper vacation, and
I stumbled across an exhibition by an artist named Munira
(00:21):
al Kadiri. The exhibition was titled Deep Fate, referring to
the origins of oil that come from deep inside the earth,
but also to how our fate is dependent on oil
and how we break away from our dependence on oil.
Munira is a Kuwaiti visual artist who was born in Senegal,
grew up in Kuwait, and studied art in Japan. She's
(00:43):
combined influences from all those cultures, but focused her attention
on the Gulf region and its intimate relationship to oil.
I was fascinated by the exhibition, partly also because she
made chemistry look interesting and beautiful and strange, which I
hadn't see before. So I wanted to have her on
the show and ask her how she thinks about the
(01:05):
inter relationship between art, climate, and fossil fuels. Monitra, Welcome
to the show.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Hello, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
A few weeks ago, I was in Helsinki for vacation
and I came across your exhibition in Kiasma, which is
one of the city's top contemporary art museums, and it
left a strong impression on me. And I'd like to
touch on the exhibition your work, how you came to
do what you do. But before we start, let me
ask you a big question, what, in your view is
(01:35):
the point of art?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Well? You know, I was underground in a tomb in
Egypt last year and I was looking at all these
paintings that are like five thousand years old, and it
felt like they were painted yesterday, you know, And I
was reminded in that moment why people make art. You know,
(01:59):
it's the only thing that remains. Everything else disappears, civilizations
came and go, but art is still there, you know,
thousands of years later. It's amazing, you know. And it's
almost like a time machine, you know, you can access
different worlds and times and maybe not, I mean, maybe
you won't know what it is anymore after, you know,
hundreds of years, but it's there now.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
The Hells and Key exhibition itself features many years of
your work. It's called Deep Fate and oil extraction, Creation
and destruction are the themes that run through your work.
Could you tell us your story and why you ended
up working on art that is linked to oil extraction.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
So I'm from Kuwait, which is a country that is
heavily dependent on oil revenue since I would say in
nineteen fifties, and as someone from there, I mean, growing
up in that place, you're kind of shielded from this subject.
You don't really realize or notice it's there except when
you go outside of it. But I lived through the
(03:04):
Gulf and Kuwait in nineteen ninety and ninety one as
a child, and it was primarily a war that started
because of oil, you know, and seven hundred oil wells
were on fire at the end of the war, and
we lived basically in an oil covered reality. I mean
it was raining black oil. Our house was black, this
(03:25):
earth was black, the sea was full of oil. And
I think that was the first time I actually saw
this stuff and I confronted it for the first time,
and since then it's never left my mind. It's always
I always think of it like almost like a genie
or an alien or a monster that has invaded our
world and refuses to leave.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
You also lived in many parts of the world, and
a lot of your art is informed by the cultures
that you've lived in. Maybe let's explore them through some
of your art works. And perhaps the most relevant one
to start with, and when I found gripping when I
was in Helsinki in Kiasma, sitting on a bench looking
(04:06):
at a TV screen, was this piece called behind the Sun.
Could you describe what the work is?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So actually, the work is about that moment that I
just described. It's a collection of amateur videos of burning
oil from Kuwait from nineteen ninety one, and I really
wanted to revisit that moment in my life because it
really has shaped me as a person. Strangely enough, there
was a film by Werner Herzog right after the war
(04:34):
where he came to Kuwait and filmed the burning oil
called Lessons of Darkness, and he basically was filming it
from a helicopter with this very kind of extravagant kind
of Wagner soundtrack, and it's a docu fiction film, so
he would narrate these excerpts from the Bible about armageddon
(04:56):
and things like that and combine it with this footage.
You know, And as a child watching that film, I
didn't understand it. I almost thought, you know, why is
this German Man lying about our war, you know what's
going on here. I didn't understand the concept of docu fiction,
you know, But of course I grew older, and then
(05:17):
I went to art school and I saw all of
Wernherzog's films, and I love his work obviously, but there
was something in me whenever I watched that film that
turns back into a seven year old child who cannot
forgive him right. So I thought I should make my
own version of it, and something that is taken from
the ground with the kind of let's say, a cultural
(05:39):
context that fits the place, which is kind of you know,
Muslim Islamic culture. And so I combined these amateur videos
of the burning oil with excerpts from Islamic television programs
about the beauty of the divine and heaven and things
like this in nature. And I combined that actually with
those images because it's strange what we consider as sublime,
(06:03):
you know, as a kid seeing oil burning in front
of me, I was also mesmerized by it. You cannot help,
I think, as a person to be not amazed, even
by images of destruction that you see in front of you.
You know, it can be so overwhelming that it becomes
kind of a sublime image, and I wanted to revisit
(06:25):
that conundrum that I have. I don't really know how
to deal with it.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
And it was also one of the first wars to
be live broadcast on TV. And you know, so many
people saw the images of oil wells being lit on
this vast landscape, flat land with big plumes of black
So I was stunted to learn that you met some
people who claimed that the images of oil soaked animals
(06:52):
was fake, was war propaganda. And this is only from
nineteen ninety. You know, it's sort of odd to say
now thirty five years on, but today reality is even
getting harder to hold onto. We live in times when
heart roots are being questioned, when many are twisting facts
to benefit themselves or turning them into complete fiction. When
(07:16):
you were faced with this kind of mistelling of history,
you created art. Could you describe the work titled Onus?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yes, so Onness is actually a work that it took
many years actually to make either of these works. You know,
it's like a long kind of process of digesting what
happened to me in my life. And when I was
an art student, actually studied in Japan, in Tokyo, and
we were in this advertising class, it's art school, and
(07:47):
professor just pulled out a picture of an oil covered
bird from Kuwait, from the war, and he proceeded on
this tirade of explaining to us how this photo was
staged and that this ever happened. And you know, because
I was so shocked, you know, and my peers are
all believing him, right, they have no other point of reference.
(08:12):
But I was so shocked that I really lost my
ability to say anything. But the sense of shock never
never left me. And I had thought about it for
so many years, that you know, over distances and time
and images and spaces and media, and that reality can
be so distorted, you know that, you know, And also
(08:33):
that sometimes images are so harsh and difficult to digest
that people don't want to believe them, right, There's also
this desire of not wanting to know, not wanting to
believe that this horrible thing happened. And so I turned
this experience into a work called Onus, which is installation
(08:56):
of about fifty glass birds covered in oil. I mean,
they look like they're covered in but they're made of glass,
black glass. And the idea was to make them out
of glass, is to also think about you know, I
wanted to revisit that moment and recreate it in the
sculptural form, but at the same time, I wanted to
(09:19):
show that human memory is also very fragile, like glass
and malleable. If someone tells you many times over that
the thing you actually saw and experienced is not real,
you also start to doubt it, you know. And that's
the amazing part about brainwashing and human persuasion, and.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
People have used it so effectively, and I think we're
getting tools in the modern world that are making it
easier and easier to be effective at creating your own reality.
What do you think people can learn from art about
living in a world where this tide of misinformation is
only likely to rise.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I mean, art is really like a reflection of the times, right,
we really live in this post truth world, and I
think a lot of art also reflects that idea that
you know. But my work is I mean, it has
a lot of political and let's say, ecological subjects, but
at the same time I see it as an exercise
(10:25):
and emotion. Right, the post truth world that we do
live in is this kind of everybody's pulling your heart
strings in different directions. It's really about emotions, you know,
and how to manipulate emotions. It's just interesting to me
how art also is doing that for people, right, We
also try to guide people into seeing different aspects of life.
(10:48):
But I think it's important. I mean, not all art
is moral as well, right, there's also artists who want
to deceive and cheat, and this is fine. It's the
same as any other kind of human endeavor, right.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Well, one of the things in that Helsinki exhibition that
also surprised me. You know, I've covered climate and energy
for a while, and oil is something that I have
to cover because there is no way to escape it
when you're covering these topics. And yet until I saw
your work, I actually hadn't seen what an oil drilling
(11:24):
equipment looks like and how odd and strange and beautiful
it is. Could you describe the work title Choreography of
Alien Technology.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Choreography of Alien Technology is really a continuation of the
series of works I've worked on for the past ten years,
let's say, around this idea of the inner mechanics of
the oil industry. Because as someone from Kuwait, I was
just shocked that I don't know anything about how this
industry operates, right, It's the source, the only source of
(11:58):
our wealth, and nobody knows how it functions, you know,
And so I was amazed at the time when I
was researching these things and I discovered oil drills. I
mean they look like phantasmogorical like marine creatures covered in
gold and diamonds to be able to drill better. And
I was really amazed, first from their shapes and forms,
(12:21):
but also strangely enough, their beauty. You know, there is
something quite beautiful about them, and so I started recreating
them in different scales, but also I would cover them
in this iridescent color scheme, which I took from the
color of oil itself. Actually, if you spill it on
(12:42):
the side of the road, it has this beautiful rainbow
sheene to it. But I also tried to link that
to the history before oil in Kuwait, which according to
some accounts was pearl diving for about two thousand years,
and pearls also have this very beautiful, shimmering kind of
doescent color. So my whole yeah, basically practice started revolving
(13:05):
around this color as the color of history. It's the
color of the past, the color of the present, which
is oil but also maybe after oil it will become
something else. So the idea is that this trickery that
this iridescence causes, because you can never see the same
color twice, is really kind of integral to my practice,
And so I make these giant drills as well that
(13:29):
rotate and also levitate in space. Instead of drilling the ground,
they're kind of drilling the air or the sky, and
they have these very magical colors. I mean, the idea
is that they are also a self portrait. I mean,
I feel I am a freak of this generation, which
is the post oil generation in the Gulf, and I
(13:51):
don't think it's going to last very long. So I
am also kind of eulogizing it, memorializing it through these
forms in a way that maybe one hundred years from now,
when oil is obsolete as a source of fuel, that
people will kind of find these works and think that, oh,
this time was quite freakish. Interesting.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Well, I'm a chemist and I've looked at molecules for
many years trying to get a PhD. And until I
saw your work where you'd use some of these irridescent
colors and ways to make molecules look interesting. Molecules that
come from oil. I was surprised that you could make
(14:32):
something that you know, people work on every day, is
so practical, is so necessary, but also be beautiful and
something that you can reflect on. You've also used technologies
that are being developed by the oil industry, you know,
not just molecules, to try and make artwork out of it.
Could you tell us about seismic songs?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
So this was a very interesting work. Basically, it's a
purple dinosaur, a t rex, the microphone sitting on the
floor in front of a screen where you can see
almost like a karaoke text, and there is a sound.
So the dinosaur is actually singing to the karaoke and
(15:12):
he is singing in auto tune, which is this vocal
effect that was developed by an oil engineer, because I
think in the oil industry they use a lot of
very advanced acoustic technology right to kind of find deposits
of oil all of this. And so this engineer apparently
was listening to the radio in the nineties and heard
(15:34):
that the singer was out of tune and thought that
he could use his know how to develop a software
to tune her voice, and he did. He managed to
do it, and he patented the technology, and to this day,
you know, autotune is a subscription and you know, all
of the music industry uses it. So I thought it
would be interesting to try to imagine that process in
(15:56):
which they say oil is remnants of you know, ancient organism,
maybe dinosaurs. I mean, maybe that's a myth, but I imagine,
you know, the dinosaur singing back to the engineer, you know,
please find me, find me deep in the earth, you know,
and singing this inn auto tune. So it's a very
comical work, but at the same time there's something very
(16:17):
tragic about it.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Join us after the break for more of my conversation
with Monira al Kadii. And while I have you, please
give Zero a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It
helps new listeners find the show. Recently, Maracent wrote love
this podcast, smart, full of info, positive and focused on solutions.
Thank you, Maracent. I want to talk to a little
(16:58):
wider implications from the work. So we are now once
again living through a time of war, act to it,
massive political upheaval even in peaceful countries, there's the destabilizing
impacts from the harms of climate change. It's a lot
to take in twenty twenty five, and there are some
(17:20):
people who are trying to develop a response, and I
want to pull one of them, which is a strand
of thinking that's taking place in some parts of the left,
especially the American left, that's been labeled as abundance. The
thinking from their side is that what the left in
the past has done, in part to fight environmental impacts,
(17:41):
has made it impossible to build an impossible to enable
all people to enjoy the benefits that come from this
world of abundance. You've lived in Kuwait, you have seen
the wider Middle East and how it has experienced abundance
in a very short period through the flood of oil
and the wealth that came with it. What do you
(18:03):
think are the lessons from your exploration of abundance that
others should be aware of.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
I made a work in twenty twenty called Holy Quarter,
which is a video of solutional glass sculptures, and so
it's actually based on a story about an explorer, British
explorer who went to the desert in the nineteen thirties
looking for the Atlantis of the sands, and all he
could find was these little black beads on the ground,
(18:31):
and the people there told him that they were pearl
necklaces of ladies that used to live in this amazing kingdom,
but God punished them because of their decadence, and all
of the city burned down and all was left was
their pearls, their black pearls. And he didn't believe them, obviously,
(18:52):
and took it back with him to the British Museum
and discovered that these were actually meteorites from outer space.
I thought it was such an interesting story, you know,
this idea of I mean, it's also a Quranic legend
about a people that were two decadent and then they
will be punished. That's a little bit. I think what
Kuwait went through after the war in nineteen ninety was
(19:14):
that a lot of people suddenly became very conservative, very religious,
because they believed that we were too ambitious and too
flashy and too wealthy, that you know, divine punishment came
to us. You know. I think this kind of thinking
is very ancient, Actually it's not new. People have this
(19:36):
idea that if you know, if you abuse your wealth
and your power, that at some point you will be punished.
Is it a divine punishment? Is it an earthly punishment.
I also feel, you know, our relationship to nature is
very much like this, like we are abusing it so
much to a point that it will become like a
(19:58):
ghost in the future that will haunt us forever. You know.
It's not a divine punishment. It's more like a For me,
it's almost like a horror film. You know that we
cannot escape. You know that it's a zombie that will
come back and cause the apocalypse. It's all of these
ideas that we have as humans. It's really like a
process of haunting, you know. And so I'm very interested
(20:21):
in this idea maybe of not abundance. I mean, my
work and my ideas as an artist, I don't really
think about kind of bettering the world. Right. What I'm
doing is I'm reflecting, I'm thinking about things, but I'm
also showing the status quo. You know. My work is
very much an exercise and also showing people the dystopia
(20:44):
that we live in. I mean, I wrote a thesis
called the Aesthetics of Sadness, which I also believe that
there is a way to find beauty and destruction even
though we cause it. You know. So I don't really
have this kind of activist bone in me. I'm really
a soothsayer, but in a very melancholic, very doomsday kind
(21:05):
of sense.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Well, let's come to sadness. The title of your PhD
thesis was the Esthetics of Sadness in the Middle East,
And one of the themes that is impossible to escape
as somebody who thinks about climate change is the immense
sadness for all the hood in the world, for all
that's going to be lost, that's being lost. There are
people who are suffering from climate damage. Is they're losing
(21:28):
their land, they're losing their culture. They're countless species that
are going extinct, some even before we've discovered them. Can
you talk me through your exploration of sadness?
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Human emotions is very varied, right, It's a whole spectrum,
and I feel like the kind of clinical way that
kind of the Western world, but especially capitalism, has defined
it is that it's a disease or it's not worth anything,
you know, But sadness has amazing ability to inform our lives.
(22:01):
It was called the noble emotion back in the day.
I think it also stems from the climate itself, of
the desert, you know, it's such a harsh place to live,
and so people would wallow in their misery but also
create beautiful art around that. And I think it's interesting
how climate also informs art making. But going to your point,
(22:25):
I mean, I recently made a very new actually video
film called Old Body of Mind, which I filmed in
Chittagong and Bangladesh on a beach where basically oil tankers
go to die. It's where they dumped the decommission disused
oil tankers. I mean that place, really, I mean it
(22:46):
looks like the end of the world. I mean, it
was so shocking to see. This is really the dark
underbelly that nobody wants to look at, nobody wants to
talk about. It's about the detritus, the leftovers of this
huge industry, right and how much destruction it has caused
to the natural environment, to cities, to you know, to
(23:08):
the people. I just find it so disturbing, and even
for me it was a discovery. I was like, how
many of these exist in the world. You know, It's
just amazing what we've managed to do and what we've
want to also cover up somehow from these activities. And
like I said, I really feel like oil is it's
a kind of monster that's taken over the world, and
(23:31):
we don't really know how to get rid of it.
I'm also not going to deny kind of my own
personal complicity in it. I think oil has revolutionized the
way we live in the modern world. We cannot deny
that right. But at the same time it's destroying us.
It's kind of a double edged sword. And how do
we reconcile these two states together. I really don't know.
(23:52):
I don't know how to. I don't have any answers.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
I'm just reflecting, just sticking on sadness. There's one aspect
of it which I think is exploring, which is recently
I read the nineteen thirty two novel Brave New World
by Aldus Huxley, and in it he describes this far
future where there's a world state and a global society
that has a strict hierarchy, and that hierarchy is maintained
(24:15):
by a huge amount of conditioning that is given to
different costs as they grow up. Everybody is happy and
the world is completely stable, and when there is any
amount of unhappiness or discomfort, people are given a drug
called soma and they are happy again. You know, it's
labeled as a dystopia, but so much of our reality today,
(24:38):
nearly one hundred years on, is that. You know, people
have been conditioned to run away from sadness, to find
dopamine hits in scrolling social media, in getting their heart notifications.
What do you think we are missing when we run
away from sadness.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
I think we are repressing a side of our minds. Right,
it's there, it doesn't disappear. It's part of our human experience.
I feel like we have to find a way to
enrich ourselves with it. It's not a it's not wrong,
you know, it's not a negative thing. This is the thing.
It's this is what I feel like. For example, in
(25:20):
the Arabian world, but also in Iran and Turkey, there's
a lot of places where this is seen as a
beautiful experience. It's it's romantic, it's it's beautiful, it's melancholic.
It's also very much I think part of the religion
as well. I think religious rituals and how people use
(25:44):
it to have cathartic experiences. You know, I don't think
the way we deal with it in our realities is
very superficial and it doesn't help a lot of people,
you know, I think people need to find solace in
it somehow.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
There's also climate activism that has come to art. You know.
There have been protests, things like throwing soup on paintings
of huge repute that have then drawn attention to the
climate crisis, to the work that the activists do. What
do you think about the effectiveness of tactics like these.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I mean, I don't know if it's effective. I feel
like there is this part of society that views art
as a decadent activity in itself, you know, that it's
it's an expression of excess of wealth, of almost evil
and finding that the existence of art itself is is
(26:45):
a moral activity, you know, And I find that a
bit obviously problematic being an artist myself. But I do
think that, you know, the way that so much value
has been attributed to art in terms of monetary value,
is a detriment to everyone. Before I think the nineteen seventies,
there was no art that was worth this kind of money, right.
(27:07):
It just it's almost became something like the stock market,
you know. I mean a few years ago we also
had artists making NFTs that were basically like stocks. You know,
for me, That was a very strange moment because people
kept asking me to do that, and I was like,
I'm not a stockbroker. I'm not doing this. You know.
It's very interesting how, you know, people kind of associate
(27:30):
art with all of these societal problems that they're having. Right,
But as I said at the beginning of our conversation,
you know, art outlives everybody, and you know, and nobody
will know why we made these things when we did
or and and you know, if the same artists or
the same artworks are even important, like fifty years from
now right, who knows, you know. So for me, it's
(27:53):
it's it's interesting. I mean, I'm trying to bring into
the museum these quests sense about climate change in oil
and petrochemicals that maybe the activists are trying to bring
with soup. You know, I'm just doing it in a
different way.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah. I think some of your work also speaks to
how art can be inclusive. I heard a story of
yours where you describe your grandfather and how he used
to sing on boats that went out pearl fishing in Kuwait,
and he was a singer and he was making art
to make the work, which is tough and hard and
(28:33):
painful easier, and that he never sang those songs at
home because that art was for a certain purpose and
it wasn't decadence. It was for being able to survive
in that time. But coming back to art and climate activism,
another aspect that has come up is that many of
the museums around the world are funded by forsl fuel companies.
(28:56):
Have you declined commissions or exhibitions or invitations as a
result of that.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Not at all. I actually find it very interesting. It's
kind of going into the belly of the beasts, you
know that if they are funding this work that disturbs them.
I find it really something to behold, you know. And
it's happened many times in my career. Actually sometimes I
(29:20):
didn't even know and then I get there and then
this museum is actually owned by oil conglomerate. I didn't
even know this, you know. And there was a lot
of raised eyebrows at the exhibition, you know, and we
even had like some you know, electrical problems, and I
was wondering, like, are the oil gods mad at me?
(29:43):
I'm from Kuwait, you know. I'm making work about, let's say,
the end of oil in a country that is, you know,
would not be able to survive without it in its
current form, right, So in a way, it's an act
of self harm. You know, I am trying to predict
the collapse of my own It's not a nice predicament
to be in, but I think it's inevitable, and I
(30:06):
try to show people there through these drill bits or
you know sci fi visions of oil refinery or you know,
beach in Bangladesh, that you know this is coming, you
know this collapse is coming, you know, and how what
parts of our culture and our being and our nation
(30:26):
will survive? You know? And they don't really want to
confront this, but that's where I come from, so I've
never shied away from it because it's it's self defeating. Really.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
There's also a flip side to this, which is we
are living through a time when freedoms are being curtailed,
especially on things you can do. And say, have you
faced censure in doing any of your work?
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Oh? Yes, many, many, many times. And obviously I come
from a non democratic society, so I'm very used to it.
I think it's mostly in democratic societies these days that
people are finding this to be new and strange and weird,
and they're trying to figure out strategies around it, right,
(31:11):
But for me, I have worked strategies around this all
my life. You know, this kind of mental gymnastics that
I play with my work. Is the work really about
this or about that? Oh? I don't know. I can't
tell you. You know, it's a strategy I've been. I'm
used to, so it's almost like I can. I think
I can teach other artists and thinkers abroad, like what
(31:33):
to do in the setting. You know, it's very weird
a situation to be in, but I'm very used to it.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Are there quick lessons you can give people? Because I
feel people would want to know what are the tricks
that you can use?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
I mean, I think it's always good to have secrets.
You know, as an artist, I make a lot of
work and I don't tell everybody what it's really about.
And it's fine that you know that there are mysteries
and secrets that other people cannot know. But some people
actually guess, right, They guess this work is about this,
And I tell them, well, you know, that's your guess,
(32:09):
and sometimes the guess is correct. So I do want
them to kind of you know, think that maybe this
is about this subject, but they don't have any proof.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Well, thank you so much for joining the show Zero.
This podcast is usually about me asking questions so that
people can give us answers and solutions. But your work
raises more problems and questions than it answers. And you're
proud of that. And I am glad that you were
able to come on the show and give us a
taste of what it is like to work on what
(32:41):
is a topic of our times, a topic that's going
to be relevant for a lot of time. And I
hope people go and explore your work wherever they can
see it in the world or on your website, which
we will link in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Thank you, Manira, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Thank you for listening to Zero. If you're interested in
seeing more of Manira's work, we've put a link in
the show notes. She's exhibiting in Berlin from now until
August twenty twenty six. Now for the sound of the week.
(33:24):
That is the sound of an oil. Well up close, gross,
isn't it. If you like this episode, please take a
moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with
someone who loves Auto tuned. This episode was produced by
Oscar boyd Our. Theme music is composed by wonder Lee.
Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison, Dungate, Samarsadi, Mosses Andim and
(33:46):
Sharon chan I am Akshatrati Back soon
Welcome to Zero. I am Akshatarati this week Art and Oil.
A few weeks ago, I was in helsinkiper vacation, and
I stumbled across an exhibition by an artist named Munira
(00:21):
al Kadiri. The exhibition was titled Deep Fate, referring to
the origins of oil that come from deep inside the earth,
but also to how our fate is dependent on oil
and how we break away from our dependence on oil.
Munira is a Kuwaiti visual artist who was born in Senegal,
grew up in Kuwait, and studied art in Japan. She's
(00:43):
combined influences from all those cultures, but focused her attention
on the Gulf region and its intimate relationship to oil.
I was fascinated by the exhibition, partly also because she
made chemistry look interesting and beautiful and strange, which I
hadn't see before. So I wanted to have her on
the show and ask her how she thinks about the
(01:05):
inter relationship between art, climate, and fossil fuels. Monitra, Welcome
to the show.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Hello, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
A few weeks ago, I was in Helsinki for vacation
and I came across your exhibition in Kiasma, which is
one of the city's top contemporary art museums, and it
left a strong impression on me. And I'd like to
touch on the exhibition your work, how you came to
do what you do. But before we start, let me
ask you a big question, what, in your view is
(01:35):
the point of art?
Speaker 2 (01:38):
Well? You know, I was underground in a tomb in
Egypt last year and I was looking at all these
paintings that are like five thousand years old, and it
felt like they were painted yesterday, you know, And I
was reminded in that moment why people make art. You know,
(01:59):
it's the only thing that remains. Everything else disappears, civilizations
came and go, but art is still there, you know,
thousands of years later. It's amazing, you know. And it's
almost like a time machine, you know, you can access
different worlds and times and maybe not, I mean, maybe
you won't know what it is anymore after, you know,
hundreds of years, but it's there now.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
The Hells and Key exhibition itself features many years of
your work. It's called Deep Fate and oil extraction, Creation
and destruction are the themes that run through your work.
Could you tell us your story and why you ended
up working on art that is linked to oil extraction.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
So I'm from Kuwait, which is a country that is
heavily dependent on oil revenue since I would say in
nineteen fifties, and as someone from there, I mean, growing
up in that place, you're kind of shielded from this subject.
You don't really realize or notice it's there except when
you go outside of it. But I lived through the
(03:04):
Gulf and Kuwait in nineteen ninety and ninety one as
a child, and it was primarily a war that started
because of oil, you know, and seven hundred oil wells
were on fire at the end of the war, and
we lived basically in an oil covered reality. I mean
it was raining black oil. Our house was black, this
(03:25):
earth was black, the sea was full of oil. And
I think that was the first time I actually saw
this stuff and I confronted it for the first time,
and since then it's never left my mind. It's always
I always think of it like almost like a genie
or an alien or a monster that has invaded our
world and refuses to leave.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
You also lived in many parts of the world, and
a lot of your art is informed by the cultures
that you've lived in. Maybe let's explore them through some
of your art works. And perhaps the most relevant one
to start with, and when I found gripping when I
was in Helsinki in Kiasma, sitting on a bench looking
(04:06):
at a TV screen, was this piece called behind the Sun.
Could you describe what the work is?
Speaker 2 (04:11):
So actually, the work is about that moment that I
just described. It's a collection of amateur videos of burning
oil from Kuwait from nineteen ninety one, and I really
wanted to revisit that moment in my life because it
really has shaped me as a person. Strangely enough, there
was a film by Werner Herzog right after the war
(04:34):
where he came to Kuwait and filmed the burning oil
called Lessons of Darkness, and he basically was filming it
from a helicopter with this very kind of extravagant kind
of Wagner soundtrack, and it's a docu fiction film, so
he would narrate these excerpts from the Bible about armageddon
(04:56):
and things like that and combine it with this footage.
You know, And as a child watching that film, I
didn't understand it. I almost thought, you know, why is
this German Man lying about our war, you know what's
going on here. I didn't understand the concept of docu fiction,
you know, But of course I grew older, and then
(05:17):
I went to art school and I saw all of
Wernherzog's films, and I love his work obviously, but there
was something in me whenever I watched that film that
turns back into a seven year old child who cannot
forgive him right. So I thought I should make my
own version of it, and something that is taken from
the ground with the kind of let's say, a cultural
(05:39):
context that fits the place, which is kind of you know,
Muslim Islamic culture. And so I combined these amateur videos
of the burning oil with excerpts from Islamic television programs
about the beauty of the divine and heaven and things
like this in nature. And I combined that actually with
those images because it's strange what we consider as sublime,
(06:03):
you know, as a kid seeing oil burning in front
of me, I was also mesmerized by it. You cannot help,
I think, as a person to be not amazed, even
by images of destruction that you see in front of you.
You know, it can be so overwhelming that it becomes
kind of a sublime image, and I wanted to revisit
(06:25):
that conundrum that I have. I don't really know how
to deal with it.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
And it was also one of the first wars to
be live broadcast on TV. And you know, so many
people saw the images of oil wells being lit on
this vast landscape, flat land with big plumes of black
So I was stunted to learn that you met some
people who claimed that the images of oil soaked animals
(06:52):
was fake, was war propaganda. And this is only from
nineteen ninety. You know, it's sort of odd to say
now thirty five years on, but today reality is even
getting harder to hold onto. We live in times when
heart roots are being questioned, when many are twisting facts
to benefit themselves or turning them into complete fiction. When
(07:16):
you were faced with this kind of mistelling of history,
you created art. Could you describe the work titled Onus?
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yes, so Onness is actually a work that it took
many years actually to make either of these works. You know,
it's like a long kind of process of digesting what
happened to me in my life. And when I was
an art student, actually studied in Japan, in Tokyo, and
we were in this advertising class, it's art school, and
(07:47):
professor just pulled out a picture of an oil covered
bird from Kuwait, from the war, and he proceeded on
this tirade of explaining to us how this photo was
staged and that this ever happened. And you know, because
I was so shocked, you know, and my peers are
all believing him, right, they have no other point of reference.
(08:12):
But I was so shocked that I really lost my
ability to say anything. But the sense of shock never
never left me. And I had thought about it for
so many years, that you know, over distances and time
and images and spaces and media, and that reality can
be so distorted, you know that, you know, And also
(08:33):
that sometimes images are so harsh and difficult to digest
that people don't want to believe them, right, There's also
this desire of not wanting to know, not wanting to
believe that this horrible thing happened. And so I turned
this experience into a work called Onus, which is installation
(08:56):
of about fifty glass birds covered in oil. I mean,
they look like they're covered in but they're made of glass,
black glass. And the idea was to make them out
of glass, is to also think about you know, I
wanted to revisit that moment and recreate it in the
sculptural form, but at the same time, I wanted to
(09:19):
show that human memory is also very fragile, like glass
and malleable. If someone tells you many times over that
the thing you actually saw and experienced is not real,
you also start to doubt it, you know. And that's
the amazing part about brainwashing and human persuasion, and.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
People have used it so effectively, and I think we're
getting tools in the modern world that are making it
easier and easier to be effective at creating your own reality.
What do you think people can learn from art about
living in a world where this tide of misinformation is
only likely to rise.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I mean, art is really like a reflection of the times, right,
we really live in this post truth world, and I
think a lot of art also reflects that idea that
you know. But my work is I mean, it has
a lot of political and let's say, ecological subjects, but
at the same time I see it as an exercise
(10:25):
and emotion. Right, the post truth world that we do
live in is this kind of everybody's pulling your heart
strings in different directions. It's really about emotions, you know,
and how to manipulate emotions. It's just interesting to me
how art also is doing that for people, right, We
also try to guide people into seeing different aspects of life.
(10:48):
But I think it's important. I mean, not all art
is moral as well, right, there's also artists who want
to deceive and cheat, and this is fine. It's the
same as any other kind of human endeavor, right.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
Well, one of the things in that Helsinki exhibition that
also surprised me. You know, I've covered climate and energy
for a while, and oil is something that I have
to cover because there is no way to escape it
when you're covering these topics. And yet until I saw
your work, I actually hadn't seen what an oil drilling
(11:24):
equipment looks like and how odd and strange and beautiful
it is. Could you describe the work title Choreography of
Alien Technology.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Choreography of Alien Technology is really a continuation of the
series of works I've worked on for the past ten years,
let's say, around this idea of the inner mechanics of
the oil industry. Because as someone from Kuwait, I was
just shocked that I don't know anything about how this
industry operates, right, It's the source, the only source of
(11:58):
our wealth, and nobody knows how it functions, you know,
And so I was amazed at the time when I
was researching these things and I discovered oil drills. I
mean they look like phantasmogorical like marine creatures covered in
gold and diamonds to be able to drill better. And
I was really amazed, first from their shapes and forms,
(12:21):
but also strangely enough, their beauty. You know, there is
something quite beautiful about them, and so I started recreating
them in different scales, but also I would cover them
in this iridescent color scheme, which I took from the
color of oil itself. Actually, if you spill it on
(12:42):
the side of the road, it has this beautiful rainbow
sheene to it. But I also tried to link that
to the history before oil in Kuwait, which according to
some accounts was pearl diving for about two thousand years,
and pearls also have this very beautiful, shimmering kind of
doescent color. So my whole yeah, basically practice started revolving
(13:05):
around this color as the color of history. It's the
color of the past, the color of the present, which
is oil but also maybe after oil it will become
something else. So the idea is that this trickery that
this iridescence causes, because you can never see the same
color twice, is really kind of integral to my practice,
And so I make these giant drills as well that
(13:29):
rotate and also levitate in space. Instead of drilling the ground,
they're kind of drilling the air or the sky, and
they have these very magical colors. I mean, the idea
is that they are also a self portrait. I mean,
I feel I am a freak of this generation, which
is the post oil generation in the Gulf, and I
(13:51):
don't think it's going to last very long. So I
am also kind of eulogizing it, memorializing it through these
forms in a way that maybe one hundred years from now,
when oil is obsolete as a source of fuel, that
people will kind of find these works and think that, oh,
this time was quite freakish. Interesting.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Well, I'm a chemist and I've looked at molecules for
many years trying to get a PhD. And until I
saw your work where you'd use some of these irridescent
colors and ways to make molecules look interesting. Molecules that
come from oil. I was surprised that you could make
(14:32):
something that you know, people work on every day, is
so practical, is so necessary, but also be beautiful and
something that you can reflect on. You've also used technologies
that are being developed by the oil industry, you know,
not just molecules, to try and make artwork out of it.
Could you tell us about seismic songs?
Speaker 2 (14:51):
So this was a very interesting work. Basically, it's a
purple dinosaur, a t rex, the microphone sitting on the
floor in front of a screen where you can see
almost like a karaoke text, and there is a sound.
So the dinosaur is actually singing to the karaoke and
(15:12):
he is singing in auto tune, which is this vocal
effect that was developed by an oil engineer, because I
think in the oil industry they use a lot of
very advanced acoustic technology right to kind of find deposits
of oil all of this. And so this engineer apparently
was listening to the radio in the nineties and heard
(15:34):
that the singer was out of tune and thought that
he could use his know how to develop a software
to tune her voice, and he did. He managed to
do it, and he patented the technology, and to this day,
you know, autotune is a subscription and you know, all
of the music industry uses it. So I thought it
would be interesting to try to imagine that process in
(15:56):
which they say oil is remnants of you know, ancient organism,
maybe dinosaurs. I mean, maybe that's a myth, but I imagine,
you know, the dinosaur singing back to the engineer, you know,
please find me, find me deep in the earth, you know,
and singing this inn auto tune. So it's a very
comical work, but at the same time there's something very
(16:17):
tragic about it.
Speaker 1 (16:22):
Join us after the break for more of my conversation
with Monira al Kadii. And while I have you, please
give Zero a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It
helps new listeners find the show. Recently, Maracent wrote love
this podcast, smart, full of info, positive and focused on solutions.
Thank you, Maracent. I want to talk to a little
(16:58):
wider implications from the work. So we are now once
again living through a time of war, act to it,
massive political upheaval even in peaceful countries, there's the destabilizing
impacts from the harms of climate change. It's a lot
to take in twenty twenty five, and there are some
(17:20):
people who are trying to develop a response, and I
want to pull one of them, which is a strand
of thinking that's taking place in some parts of the left,
especially the American left, that's been labeled as abundance. The
thinking from their side is that what the left in
the past has done, in part to fight environmental impacts,
(17:41):
has made it impossible to build an impossible to enable
all people to enjoy the benefits that come from this
world of abundance. You've lived in Kuwait, you have seen
the wider Middle East and how it has experienced abundance
in a very short period through the flood of oil
and the wealth that came with it. What do you
(18:03):
think are the lessons from your exploration of abundance that
others should be aware of.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
I made a work in twenty twenty called Holy Quarter,
which is a video of solutional glass sculptures, and so
it's actually based on a story about an explorer, British
explorer who went to the desert in the nineteen thirties
looking for the Atlantis of the sands, and all he
could find was these little black beads on the ground,
(18:31):
and the people there told him that they were pearl
necklaces of ladies that used to live in this amazing kingdom,
but God punished them because of their decadence, and all
of the city burned down and all was left was
their pearls, their black pearls. And he didn't believe them, obviously,
(18:52):
and took it back with him to the British Museum
and discovered that these were actually meteorites from outer space.
I thought it was such an interesting story, you know,
this idea of I mean, it's also a Quranic legend
about a people that were two decadent and then they
will be punished. That's a little bit. I think what
Kuwait went through after the war in nineteen ninety was
(19:14):
that a lot of people suddenly became very conservative, very religious,
because they believed that we were too ambitious and too
flashy and too wealthy, that you know, divine punishment came
to us. You know. I think this kind of thinking
is very ancient, Actually it's not new. People have this
(19:36):
idea that if you know, if you abuse your wealth
and your power, that at some point you will be punished.
Is it a divine punishment? Is it an earthly punishment.
I also feel, you know, our relationship to nature is
very much like this, like we are abusing it so
much to a point that it will become like a
(19:58):
ghost in the future that will haunt us forever. You know.
It's not a divine punishment. It's more like a For me,
it's almost like a horror film. You know that we
cannot escape. You know that it's a zombie that will
come back and cause the apocalypse. It's all of these
ideas that we have as humans. It's really like a
process of haunting, you know. And so I'm very interested
(20:21):
in this idea maybe of not abundance. I mean, my
work and my ideas as an artist, I don't really
think about kind of bettering the world. Right. What I'm
doing is I'm reflecting, I'm thinking about things, but I'm
also showing the status quo. You know. My work is
very much an exercise and also showing people the dystopia
(20:44):
that we live in. I mean, I wrote a thesis
called the Aesthetics of Sadness, which I also believe that
there is a way to find beauty and destruction even
though we cause it. You know. So I don't really
have this kind of activist bone in me. I'm really
a soothsayer, but in a very melancholic, very doomsday kind
(21:05):
of sense.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Well, let's come to sadness. The title of your PhD
thesis was the Esthetics of Sadness in the Middle East,
And one of the themes that is impossible to escape
as somebody who thinks about climate change is the immense
sadness for all the hood in the world, for all
that's going to be lost, that's being lost. There are
people who are suffering from climate damage. Is they're losing
(21:28):
their land, they're losing their culture. They're countless species that
are going extinct, some even before we've discovered them. Can
you talk me through your exploration of sadness?
Speaker 2 (21:39):
Human emotions is very varied, right, It's a whole spectrum,
and I feel like the kind of clinical way that
kind of the Western world, but especially capitalism, has defined
it is that it's a disease or it's not worth anything,
you know, But sadness has amazing ability to inform our lives.
(22:01):
It was called the noble emotion back in the day.
I think it also stems from the climate itself, of
the desert, you know, it's such a harsh place to live,
and so people would wallow in their misery but also
create beautiful art around that. And I think it's interesting
how climate also informs art making. But going to your point,
(22:25):
I mean, I recently made a very new actually video
film called Old Body of Mind, which I filmed in
Chittagong and Bangladesh on a beach where basically oil tankers
go to die. It's where they dumped the decommission disused
oil tankers. I mean that place, really, I mean it
(22:46):
looks like the end of the world. I mean, it
was so shocking to see. This is really the dark
underbelly that nobody wants to look at, nobody wants to
talk about. It's about the detritus, the leftovers of this
huge industry, right and how much destruction it has caused
to the natural environment, to cities, to you know, to
(23:08):
the people. I just find it so disturbing, and even
for me it was a discovery. I was like, how
many of these exist in the world. You know, It's
just amazing what we've managed to do and what we've
want to also cover up somehow from these activities. And
like I said, I really feel like oil is it's
a kind of monster that's taken over the world, and
(23:31):
we don't really know how to get rid of it.
I'm also not going to deny kind of my own
personal complicity in it. I think oil has revolutionized the
way we live in the modern world. We cannot deny
that right. But at the same time it's destroying us.
It's kind of a double edged sword. And how do
we reconcile these two states together. I really don't know.
(23:52):
I don't know how to. I don't have any answers.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
I'm just reflecting, just sticking on sadness. There's one aspect
of it which I think is exploring, which is recently
I read the nineteen thirty two novel Brave New World
by Aldus Huxley, and in it he describes this far
future where there's a world state and a global society
that has a strict hierarchy, and that hierarchy is maintained
(24:15):
by a huge amount of conditioning that is given to
different costs as they grow up. Everybody is happy and
the world is completely stable, and when there is any
amount of unhappiness or discomfort, people are given a drug
called soma and they are happy again. You know, it's
labeled as a dystopia, but so much of our reality today,
(24:38):
nearly one hundred years on, is that. You know, people
have been conditioned to run away from sadness, to find
dopamine hits in scrolling social media, in getting their heart notifications.
What do you think we are missing when we run
away from sadness.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
I think we are repressing a side of our minds. Right,
it's there, it doesn't disappear. It's part of our human experience.
I feel like we have to find a way to
enrich ourselves with it. It's not a it's not wrong,
you know, it's not a negative thing. This is the thing.
It's this is what I feel like. For example, in
(25:20):
the Arabian world, but also in Iran and Turkey, there's
a lot of places where this is seen as a
beautiful experience. It's it's romantic, it's it's beautiful, it's melancholic.
It's also very much I think part of the religion
as well. I think religious rituals and how people use
(25:44):
it to have cathartic experiences. You know, I don't think
the way we deal with it in our realities is
very superficial and it doesn't help a lot of people,
you know, I think people need to find solace in
it somehow.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
There's also climate activism that has come to art. You know.
There have been protests, things like throwing soup on paintings
of huge repute that have then drawn attention to the
climate crisis, to the work that the activists do. What
do you think about the effectiveness of tactics like these.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I mean, I don't know if it's effective. I feel
like there is this part of society that views art
as a decadent activity in itself, you know, that it's
it's an expression of excess of wealth, of almost evil
and finding that the existence of art itself is is
(26:45):
a moral activity, you know, And I find that a
bit obviously problematic being an artist myself. But I do
think that, you know, the way that so much value
has been attributed to art in terms of monetary value,
is a detriment to everyone. Before I think the nineteen seventies,
there was no art that was worth this kind of money, right.
(27:07):
It just it's almost became something like the stock market,
you know. I mean a few years ago we also
had artists making NFTs that were basically like stocks. You know,
for me, That was a very strange moment because people
kept asking me to do that, and I was like,
I'm not a stockbroker. I'm not doing this. You know.
It's very interesting how, you know, people kind of associate
(27:30):
art with all of these societal problems that they're having. Right,
But as I said at the beginning of our conversation,
you know, art outlives everybody, and you know, and nobody
will know why we made these things when we did
or and and you know, if the same artists or
the same artworks are even important, like fifty years from
now right, who knows, you know. So for me, it's
(27:53):
it's it's interesting. I mean, I'm trying to bring into
the museum these quests sense about climate change in oil
and petrochemicals that maybe the activists are trying to bring
with soup. You know, I'm just doing it in a
different way.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah. I think some of your work also speaks to
how art can be inclusive. I heard a story of
yours where you describe your grandfather and how he used
to sing on boats that went out pearl fishing in Kuwait,
and he was a singer and he was making art
to make the work, which is tough and hard and
(28:33):
painful easier, and that he never sang those songs at
home because that art was for a certain purpose and
it wasn't decadence. It was for being able to survive
in that time. But coming back to art and climate activism,
another aspect that has come up is that many of
the museums around the world are funded by forsl fuel companies.
(28:56):
Have you declined commissions or exhibitions or invitations as a
result of that.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Not at all. I actually find it very interesting. It's
kind of going into the belly of the beasts, you
know that if they are funding this work that disturbs them.
I find it really something to behold, you know. And
it's happened many times in my career. Actually sometimes I
(29:20):
didn't even know and then I get there and then
this museum is actually owned by oil conglomerate. I didn't
even know this, you know. And there was a lot
of raised eyebrows at the exhibition, you know, and we
even had like some you know, electrical problems, and I
was wondering, like, are the oil gods mad at me?
(29:43):
I'm from Kuwait, you know. I'm making work about, let's say,
the end of oil in a country that is, you know,
would not be able to survive without it in its
current form, right, So in a way, it's an act
of self harm. You know, I am trying to predict
the collapse of my own It's not a nice predicament
to be in, but I think it's inevitable, and I
(30:06):
try to show people there through these drill bits or
you know sci fi visions of oil refinery or you know,
beach in Bangladesh, that you know this is coming, you
know this collapse is coming, you know, and how what
parts of our culture and our being and our nation
(30:26):
will survive? You know? And they don't really want to
confront this, but that's where I come from, so I've
never shied away from it because it's it's self defeating. Really.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
There's also a flip side to this, which is we
are living through a time when freedoms are being curtailed,
especially on things you can do. And say, have you
faced censure in doing any of your work?
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Oh? Yes, many, many, many times. And obviously I come
from a non democratic society, so I'm very used to it.
I think it's mostly in democratic societies these days that
people are finding this to be new and strange and weird,
and they're trying to figure out strategies around it, right,
(31:11):
But for me, I have worked strategies around this all
my life. You know, this kind of mental gymnastics that
I play with my work. Is the work really about
this or about that? Oh? I don't know. I can't
tell you. You know, it's a strategy I've been. I'm
used to, so it's almost like I can. I think
I can teach other artists and thinkers abroad, like what
(31:33):
to do in the setting. You know, it's very weird
a situation to be in, but I'm very used to it.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Are there quick lessons you can give people? Because I
feel people would want to know what are the tricks
that you can use?
Speaker 2 (31:46):
I mean, I think it's always good to have secrets.
You know, as an artist, I make a lot of
work and I don't tell everybody what it's really about.
And it's fine that you know that there are mysteries
and secrets that other people cannot know. But some people
actually guess, right, They guess this work is about this,
And I tell them, well, you know, that's your guess,
(32:09):
and sometimes the guess is correct. So I do want
them to kind of you know, think that maybe this
is about this subject, but they don't have any proof.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Well, thank you so much for joining the show Zero.
This podcast is usually about me asking questions so that
people can give us answers and solutions. But your work
raises more problems and questions than it answers. And you're
proud of that. And I am glad that you were
able to come on the show and give us a
taste of what it is like to work on what
(32:41):
is a topic of our times, a topic that's going
to be relevant for a lot of time. And I
hope people go and explore your work wherever they can
see it in the world or on your website, which
we will link in the show notes.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Thank you, Manira, Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1 (33:04):
Thank you for listening to Zero. If you're interested in
seeing more of Manira's work, we've put a link in
the show notes. She's exhibiting in Berlin from now until
August twenty twenty six. Now for the sound of the week.
(33:24):
That is the sound of an oil. Well up close, gross,
isn't it. If you like this episode, please take a
moment to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts
and Spotify. Share this episode with a friend or with
someone who loves Auto tuned. This episode was produced by
Oscar boyd Our. Theme music is composed by wonder Lee.
Special thanks to Eleanor Harrison, Dungate, Samarsadi, Mosses Andim and
(33:46):
Sharon chan I am Akshatrati Back soon
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.