• Exhibition Date: January 25 - February 9th 2012

Mendeel Um A7mad (NxIxSxM) is a film and sculpture installation by New York-based artists Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid al Gharaballi. The Arab Fund for Art and Culture (AFAC) grant-winning project presents the tissue box as an unlikely Kuwaiti national icon. A film will be projected inside a monumental tissue box–created in collaboration with Kuwait-based designers Aziz Alqatami and Nanu Al-Hamad. The film aims to create a representation of the Chai Dhaha ritual, a traditional female forum, using an all-male cast in homage to Abdul Aziz Al-Nimish–who pioneered gender role reversal in Kuwaiti theatre.

In Mendeel Um A7mad (NxIxSxM), the Chai Dhaha ritual is set out-of-context, in a wedding ballroom to illustrate the absurd spatial conditions of post-oil boom Kuwaiti interior aesthetics, where designing to human scale took a backseat to supersized ostentation. The tissue box sculpture acts as a displaced, large-scale replica of an actual box featured in the film–a sixth “character,” performance instigator and voyeur/witness.