A giant rainbow-coloured object sits in the gallery. It could be a pearl, a deep-sea creature or something from a sci-fi film. It is actually based on an oil drill bit.

This is one of the recurring images in the work of Monira Al Qadiri, a Kuwaiti artist who has spent years looking at the two industries that transformed the Gulf: pearl diving and oil.

Born in Dakar in 1983 and raised in Kuwait, Al Qadiri later moved to Japan, where she completed a PhD in Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. She is now based in Berlin and works across sculpture, film and installation.

Much of her work deals with what she calls petro-culture — a society shaped by oil and everything that comes with it. But instead of showing refineries or oil fields, she takes the machinery behind the industry and turns it into something completely different.

In Alien Technology, a series started in 2014, Monira enlarged industrial oil-drill heads into three-metre sculptures covered in iridescent automotive paint.

Without their original context, the forms start to resemble shells, insects or bioluminescent sea creatures. The reference to the sea isn't accidental: the sculptures connect the oil industry with the pearl trade that dominated the Gulf economy before it.

With Wonder (2016–2018), Al Qadiri reversed the scale. Working with a Japanese pearl carver, she had natural pearls carved into miniature oil-drill heads, each about one centimetre across.

Pearl diving and trading had existed in the Gulf for thousands of years before largely disappearing with the rise of the oil economy. Here, those two periods become one tiny object: the material of the old economy reshaped into the machine of the new one.

For the 2022 Venice Biennale, Al Qadiri created ORBITAL — three rotating oil-drill sculptures covered in iridescent automotive paint.

Earlier versions of these forms — OR-BIT — had been displayed using magnetic levitation. In ORBITAL, the drill heads became larger and slowly rotated in the air, somewhere between industrial machinery and alien organisms.

The colours are important too. Oil can produce the same rainbow-like sheen as a pearl. Monira uses that visual similarity to connect two materials that brought wealth to the Gulf at very different moments in its history.

In 2025, Al Qadiri moved away from the oil drill with First Sun, a five-metre-tall painted aluminium sculpture with a human body and a giant scarab in place of a face.

The idea came from a visit to the Tomb of Ramses I in Egypt, where she saw an image of Khepri, the ancient Egyptian god of the rising sun, depicted with the head of a scarab. Al Qadiri reimagined the figure as an enormous, iridescent and androgynous monument.

The work shifts her attention from oil to another question: the way humans place themselves above the rest of the natural world. In Ancient Egypt, a beetle could represent a god; in Al Qadiri's version, the insect becomes monumental again.

First Sun was first installed at Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the entrance to Central Park in New York, where it remained from September 2025 to August 2026. In September 2026, it moved to the Lassonde Art Trail in Toronto's Biidaasige Park, where it is currently on view.

It looks very different from her oil drills, but the trick is familiar: take something we think we recognise — a drill, a pearl, a beetle — change its scale and context, and suddenly make us look at it again.