Sophia Al-Maria is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker living and working in London. Though her work spans many disciplines including drawing, collage, sculpture and film it is united by a preoccupation with the power of storytelling and myth, and in particular with imagining revisionist histories and alternative futures.

With her friend and collaborator Fatima Al Qadiri, Al-Maria coined the term “Gulf Futurism” to describe the growing atomisation of individuals and the shifting ground of urban planning, aesthetics, and media, and their impact on everyday life in the post-oil Persian Gulf. Her cinematic artist’s videos are fuelled by the combination of critical rigour with an affective charge in their explorations of language, imperialism, and counter-histories – a deep investigation and dramatisation of the sociopolitical, economic, and environmental present.

Al-Maria’s debut exhibition in the United States, at the Whitney Museum of Art, 2016, attends to the Gulf’s embrace of consumerism. Black Friday features primarily of shots of empty shopping centres in Doha. An unseen narrator declares the mall as the place “where the glamorous heart of evil is born”, a place of entrapment and confusion complete with faces blurred beyond recognition and bodies collapsed on the floor. 

Al-Maria was Whitechapel Gallery’s Writer in Residence 2018, resulting in her exhibition BCE comprising of films, performances and readings, including her first collaboration with the artist Sin Wai Kin. Her most recent collection of essays and writings, Sad Sack, was published by Book Works in 2019.

In 2023, Al-Maria presented the trilogy of videos together for the first time in the a solo exhibition, Not My Bag, at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. The trilogy of works includes Beast Type Song presented at Tate Britain, 2019; Tender Point Ruin commissioned by LUMA Foundation, Arles in 2021 and concluded with Tiger Strike Red, 2022 which formed the artists solo presentation at the Pavillion of Applied Arts, part of The Milk Of Dreams | 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

Sophia Al-Maria recently opened Grey Unpleasant Land, a major collaborative exhibition with Lydia Ourahmane at Spike Island, Bristol. 

The collective DIS is exemplary in defining what Hannah Black in Artforum describes as the “relentless anxiety about the conditions and possibilities of art and life, express(ing) the despairing atomization, and the compromised longing for solidarity, of a post-bourgeois creative class hovering on the brink of its own obsolescence”.

Formed in 2010, after the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis and global recession, DIS as an entity has over the decade typified its aesthetic, cultural, political and economic impact. Composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso and David Toro, DIS’ interventions blur the distinctions between art, curation, theory, advertising, fashion, retail and technology, manifesting across a range of media and platforms, from site-specific museum and gallery exhibitions to ongoing online projects, often all at once. Their work exists often simultaneously online and in situ, as well as more traditional mediums like photography, sculpture, video and installation. Their current multi year project dis.art is a subscriber-based online video channel popularising in “edutainment”, helping us understand the complicated social machinery of our techno-capitalist world. The channel presents new commissions with other artists as well as DIS’ own content.

In 2021, DIS co-curated the Biennial for Image Movement Geneva, featuring their latest work Everything but the World. In a series of interrelated vignettes, Everything But The World presents a non-linear, natural history show about homo sapiens, linking the agricultural revolution to Amazon fulfillment centers. It addresses the gulf between the complexity of the human’s global existence and the smallness of their private everyday lives, and confronts our obsession with “the end of the world” knowing the arrogance of that word: ‘the’.

Recent solo exhibitions include, How To Become A Fossil at Secession, Vienna, Everything But The World at Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and Big Beat Disaster at Project Native Informant, London. 

Artist, writer, musician and performer Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987, Bryan-College Station, Texas) excels in probing dormant and marginalized histories, narratives and technologies to challenge discourses around contemporary perceptions of identity, futurity and politics.

Through painting, photography, text and video, she has defined a singular aesthetics of language that often plays into a digital, Tumblr-ised visual identity, a kind of collaged rap and visual rapture. Huxtable’s practice offers a key critical voice on identity, as well as, specifically, her own identity as a black trans woman. Her work comments on different forms of reality through the lens of her personal structural experience. Inseparable from the political, the personal is our opportunity for disobedience, and Huxtable plays with this concept through her ever-evolving portrait of selfhood.

Huxtable is concerned with the way in which marginalised groups are ‘forced to be their own saints’. Hinged on empathy, desire and agile distortion as a political and social paradigm, Huxtable’s motive re-examines our understanding of ‘the image’ and ‘the human’. Her works pool together references from science fiction, queer nightlife, Internet subcultures, folklore, fetishes and Furry fandom, into portrayals of intersectionality and speculative social archetypes as a method of resistance and liberation.

In 2022, Project Native Informant presented AKIMBO SPITTLE. In the exhibition, Huxtable places her own body at the centre of mythologising scenes; the printed and overpainted canvases set against hallucinogenic landscapes render her figures half human, half animal. 

Huxtable’s recently opened solo exhibition HEADS & TAILS IN THE STRUGGLE FOR ICONICITY presented the artist with the opportunity to broaden the cast of characters populating the canvases. From the exploration of her own image in the previous show, Huxtable here takes the work a step further; an exercise in world building if you will, resulting in a universe of her own creation.

In 2017, Huxtable published Mucus in My Pineal Gland, a celebrated volume of poems, performance scripts and essays. In the same year, MUMOK and Huxtable published Life: A Novel, a collaborative science-fiction narrative with artist Hannah Black. 

Her works and performances have been presented internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; Hayward Gallery, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA, Boston; MoMA PS1, New York and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, amongst others. 

Her work can be found in the collections of Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art, Stockholm.