They’ve literally laid out the red carpet for this slick, ambitious focus on the vast oil tankers shipping black gold around the world. Monira Al Qadiri, a young Kuwaiti-born artist, plays with scale in the exhibition, with an enormous painted tanker extending along an entire wall of the space, in contrast with the flotilla of meticulously painted, toy-sized ships opposite.
There’s an enormous ship’s bow, normally hidden beneath the water, protruding grotesquely into the hall like a bulbous red nose. Finally, at the far end of the space, a video work draws on Arthur Rimbaud’s great poem ‘The Drunken Boat’ to create a brooding video work, as decommissioned tankers, beached like whale carcasses, are dismantled for scrap by tiny human figures scampering over them. The artist has ensured the exhibition is a spectacle: the tankers have a palpable presence, sinister yet mindless agents complicit in globalised environmental degradation.
And though zeroing in on the role of the tanker undoubtedly gives a new perspective, it feels overly orchestrated. The exhibition’s various elements add up to contrivance. There’s always something a bit deficient in criticising a show for being too well-finished – as if there could be something wrong with a project being too well put together. Yet in its pursuit of a kind of cinematic perfection, its manicured sleekness lacks genuine resonance that no amount of profound music or symbolist poetry can replace.
- Monira Al Qadiri’s: Hero, Berlinische Galerie, Kreuzberg. Through Aug 17, 2026, details
