Gulf Futurism: If you are au fait with the work of Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker (and lately rock-techno band vocalist and stand-up comedian) Sophia Al-Maria, it is a term you would know. Spanning film, television, literature, music, and fine art, Al-Maria’s practice is so prolific and expansive that it does not bear rehashing here. The term, coined by Al-Maria and Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri in a 2012 article for Dazed magazine, denotes a conceptual matrix. The pair sought to delineate the contours of a pop-cultural, architectural, and aesthetic sensibility emerging across the Arabian Gulf, tying the space-age hypermodernity of its glittering cities, and the cultural conditions emerging within them, back to the region’s fossil-fueled ascent.

Its foundations were rhizomatic, qualifying surface observations of the Gulf’s cultural and physical landscapes with a robust critique of the mechanisms (like environmental catastrophe) implicit in the region’s rise. Its absorption into the pop-theoretical canon, however, has narrowed its scope to wide-eyed fascination with the transformation of desert trading ports and oasis towns into beacons of late-stage globalized capitalism.

HiLux (2025), Al-Maria’s solo presentation at Art Basel Qatar with Dubai-based gallery The Third Line, marks an important juncture for the artist. ‘I’ve been trying to correct the way that that phrase was taken for years,’ she sighs over Zoom from her studio in London’s Somerset House. ‘It’s been so aestheticized, when it was, in the first place, satirical, and also critical of the way that fossil fuels and geopolitics in the Gulf affect the body – and people’s perceptions of each other.’ An expression of the uncertain future toward which the region – and, frankly, the world at large – careens, drawing on modern Bedouin runes, the relics of an ostensibly death-driven masculinity, and gas-guzzling cars, ‘this show in February is a rearticulation of Gulf Futurism, in a way, but without all the words,’ Al-Maria says.

Comprising a series of drawings and a sound installation, the presentation takes Toyota’s all-terrain Hilux truck as a material referent for a cultural history that has been increasingly overwritten as several Gulf states’ pursuit of geopolitical power has upped a gear. ‘The Hilux truck is a really important icon in the Gulf,’ Al-Maria says. ‘Unlike the Land Cruiser or the Range Rover, which are associated with wealthier city people, the Toyota Hilux is still seen as a very Bedouin car.’

Rather than showing the burly pickups, Al-Maria’s drawings appropriate the decals they are often decorated with. Sourced from a Doha autobody shop, the graphic stripes zag and swoosh the full length of the vehicles’ flanks, in ardent hues. ‘They look a bit like really bad tribal tattoos,’ Al-Maria chuckles, ‘but a few years ago I realized that they were supposed to be flames. All these years I’d been staring at these side decals, I had never really understood that they were actually images.’

This realization prompted a shift in Al-Maria’s perception. The decals felt emblematic of her Qatar and of an Indigenous existence that complicates the young nation-state’s near-unanimous global perception: more high-luxe than HiLux. ‘The [decals] felt like a fitting metaphor for the way that we are taught to think about history: these narrative lines that entail this process of flattening – of perspective and of our stories. It was like seeing time’s killing arrow,’ she says, quoting sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin. ‘But in acceleration.’

The works see Al-Maria layer and warp these linear motifs – in a gesture that bends time’s singular, inevitable path, and vindicates a cultural history and identity that finds itself ever at odds with the Gulf’s ‘future-forward’ progression. The sound installation compounds the elegiac timbre of the wall-based works, drawing upon contemporary, over-auto-tuned renditions of Bedouin folk poems (sheilat) and the formal structures of pre-Islamic poetry like the rhyming, single-meter qasidah. ‘I often reference the way these poems open: a poet coming upon traces in the desert; ashes or burnt wood from a fire; a footprint, or a ramshackle, ruined home.’ Recorded in collaboration with the artist’s father, the soundscape is also an aural tribute, Al-Maria says, ‘to my brothers, my father, and men in my family, who I think are constantly othered and misjudged. Not just in the West, but also in the region.’

It is this achingly human texture that gives the work meaning beyond statement-making. Yes, Al-Maria is essentially allegorizing her family history to draw attention to complex realities, but this is also an attempt to ‘make a little ode, in the qasidah sense,’ she says, ‘to my family and to the shock and awe of going from a free agrarian lifestyle to technological capitalism and consumerism within a decade or two.’ There is also the sheer number of family members who have died in violent car accidents. ‘Most of them were young men – though my grandfather also died that way,’ she explains. HiLux, then, becomes an expression of personal grief, with the weight of its mourning carried far beyond the tragedy of individual lives lost. ‘It’s a eulogy for futures that never arrived – and for the fact we’re all going to be victims of a future we knew was coming. Whether or not we’re at the wheel is the question.’

The presentation marks a prodigal return to Doha for Al-Maria, who has been based in the US, Berlin, and London, her current location, since last living in Qatar in the early 2010s – though she staged a major solo exhibition in Doha at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in 2022, the year Qatar hosted the World Cup. This homecoming’s significance is reinforced by the fact that, for a number of years now, Al-Maria has ‘tried to avoid being geographically defined,’ consciously flowing her practice around the art academy’s will to situate artists and their work within the context of their origins.

Irrespective of geography, a throughline of much of Al-Maria’s recent work has been the act of challenging dominant perspectives, and revealing how they steer life’s direction, whether at the granular level of personal interactions or the macro-scale of global policymaking. Often, this has entailed a fourth-wall-shattering invocation of agency and participation – mental or physical – on the part of her public. A five-day stand-up performance she staged in London this fall, for example, disturbed the assumed sincerity of an art-fair context. In her first major performance venture to date, Al-Maria invoked comedy’s potential to address the world’s grim realities without overtly overstepping the thin red line. ‘I actually did a strike on the second day’ – a Thursday, Al-Maria highlights, aligning with the global general strikes for Gaza that have been taking place on Thursdays since August 2025.

The following day brought with it a speech on access to land rights; the day after, Al-Maria’s ‘marriage’ to an audience member. ‘People were responsive, which felt really sweet,’ she says. ‘But it really felt like the fair couldn't control this space,’ which offered a necessary counterpoint to institutional contexts. And her most recent institutional exhibition, ‘Grey Unpleasant Land’ (2024) at Spike Island in Bristol, a dual-showing with Algeria-born artist Lydia Ourahmane, offered a searing interrogation of the material and mythological premises of Britain’s national identity.

HiLux is not exactly an extension of Al-Maria’s intentions in the Bristol show, but the artist’s preoccupation with the hegemonic processes and logics of modern nation-state building abides. Just as the qasidah traditionally opens with the discovery of eerie traces of long-lost humanity in the desert, Al-Maria’s decal drawings become remnants of erased histories and compromised futures, transferred onto sky-rising walls of mirrored glass and steel just as ‘the window of opportunity to change path is closing.’ The sense of apocalypse at the presentation’s heart is impossible to shake off, but Al-Maria sees it more as ‘the lifting of a veil; a realization and revelation of that which is coming. And, also, a submission to the fact that we can't all drive.’