Sophia Al-Maria

Virgin With A Memory

06 September 2016 — 02 November 2016

Cornerhouse, Manchester

Artist, filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria, who rose to fame with her 2012 memoir The Girl Who Fell to Earth, presents a newly commissioned body of work for her first major exhibition, Virgin with a Memory.

The exhibition takes its cue from Beretta, Al-Maria’s unfinished debut feature film. The film has stalled in pre-production for three years having faced immense schedule, budget and legal complications. Virgin with a Memoryalludes to the production challenges faced by Al-Maria and the social and political themes that are central to the film’s plot.

Both an homage to cult cinema and a call to arms, Beretta is a rape-revenge thriller following mute heroine Suad who embarks on a killing spree, murdering men who harass her and other women. Set in contemporary Egypt, it tells both the story of a woman who is pushed to extremes by her environment, and a country that was raped and degraded by its governments.

The exhibition features new five-channel video installation The Watchers No. 1-5 (2014), which evokes the all-seeing male gaze with a reenactment of a dream sequence from Beretta’s script. Conceived as a ‘deleted scenes’ extra from the unmade movie, it will form the centrepiece of Virgin with a Memory, presenting a nightmarish cavalcade of aggressive male scrutiny, using sweeping searchlights and an ominous droning soundtrack. The men depicted in the piece represent Beretta’s five villains. In a departure from the plot, they are shown holding an eternal vigil, acting as gatekeepers to the final realisation of the film.

Four new pseudo-documentary works relate directly to the production of Beretta. Class A (2014) is a video-ode to a Beretta actress who was jailed before filming began. Slaughter (2013) is culled from the first film footage shot during the 2012 Eid al Adha (Festival of Sacrifice). Your Sister (2014) is an imitation music video made to play on a television on Beretta’s set. Video piece Evil Eye (2014) is a direct response to the testing delays faced by the production team during the seemingly cursed development stage of the film.

The novelised version of Beretta’s script, Virgin with a Memory: The Exhibition Tie-in, will be published for the exhibition. This piece is predicated on Al-Maria’s idea that in today’s challenging environment for independent cinema, the only way to achieve an unadulterated director’s cut of a film is to write it as a novel, making it the director’s sole property. Darker and more introspective than the medium of film allows, the novel is written from the perspective of Suad and interspersed with entries from Al-Maria’s production diary. It also features production research, emails, budgets, kit-lists, schedules, sketches, storyboards, headshots and excerpts from the shooting script. It will be on display in the exhibition and available to buy from the bookshop.

Sophia Al-Maria

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.

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