The exhibition creates an immersive experience, capturing the chaotic, almost apocalyptic act of consuming. The viewer is invited to experience illusions of order in underlying confusion and pandemonium.

Black Friday(2016) shown here outside museum context for the first time, is a projected video featuring primarily empty malls in Doha (Qatar) and offers a moody, sinister take on shopping. Designed at seemingly impossible scale with incredible heights, the malls featured in the video appear as dizzying temples dedicated to artifice and capitalism, showing how scripted environment of the shopping mall is a form of default religious architecture in a culture of consumerism.

In her new series of works, EVERYTHING MUST GO, Sophia introduces a playful twist, juxtaposing emblems of consumerism with military jargon and captures the crux of the end of days where chaos and destruction are met by a violent military attempt to reinstate order. EVERYTHING MUST GO consists of a large series of stills taken from Black Fridays The Litany series an installation of numerous electronic devices displaying flickering, short and glitching loops of countless consumption references each printed with either a fake beauty product term or military idiom. When read together or even at random, the grouping of words result in absurd and obscene combinations.

Throughout her practice, Sophia has been finding ways to describe 21st century life in the Gulf through art, writing, and film-making. She has explored different complexities such as environmental damage, religious conservatism, and historical contradictions that the Gulf has encountered. Sophia is a young artist aware of the rapid changing times and capable of articulating the controversies that cause friction in contemporary Gulf cities.

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, Zizeks The Desert of the Unreal, As-Sufis Islamic Book of the Dead, as well as imagery from Islamic eschatology, post humanism and the global mythos of Science Fiction.

Her work has been exhibited in various institutional shows around the world, including Black Friday, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA (2016); Repetition, Villa Empain, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, Belgium (2016); Imitation of Life at HOME, Manchester (2016); In Search of Lost Time, The Brunei Gallery, London (2016); 89plus: Filter Bubble, LUMA Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland (2015); 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum, New York, NY, USA (2015); Common Grounds, Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany (2015); Extinctions Marathon: Visions of the Future, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2014); Virgin with a memory, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK (2014); Do It, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (2013); The 9th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2012); For your Eyes Only, St. Paul Street Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand (2012); Dowse Museum, Wellington, New Zealand (2012); Genre Specific Xperience, New Museum, New York, NY, USA (2011); Bendari & the Bunduqia, Waqif Art Centre, Doha, Qatar (2007) and We Few: A Comic Palindrome, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt (2005). Her writing has appeared in Harpers Magazine, Five Dials, Triple Canopy, and Bidoun. In 2007, she published her first autobiographical novel, The Girl Who Fell to Earth (Harper Collins Perennial).

Sophia recently guest edited an issue of the experimental art-writing journal The Happy Hypocrite, entitled Fresh Hell.

She currently lives and works in London, UK.

Writing via press release provided by the gallery

The rest is here:

Sophia Al Maria: EVERYTHING MUST GO at The Third Line - Arte Fuse