Monira Al Qadiri:
First Sun

Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York
September 3, 2025 through August 2, 2026
Exhibition Review by Raphy Sarkissian

In the shadow of the Plaza Hotel, where the city's Gilded Age limestone meets the organic sprawl of Central Park, stands a seventeen-foot apparition of a human form, its visage eclipsed by a towering scarab. Monira Al Qadiri's First Sun does not recite — it arrests. Its body holds an irresolute purple while the scarab itself reveals a chromatic transformation with time of day and point of view, recalling the lenticular postcards of the 1970s, here made monumental and mythological. The insect’s varying colors mimic the natural pearlescence of beetle shells, honoring the beauty of the often-overlooked organism. By grafting the iridescent carapace of a scarab, the ancient Egyptian Khepri, god of the rising sun, resurrection, and transformation, onto a colossal gender-fluid figure, the sculpture positions itself as a subversive landmark among its neighbors. The resplendently gilded militarism of Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Sherman Monument (1903) and the classical femininity of Karl Bitter's Pomona (1916) stand just steps away.

The work's power lies in its material dissonance — of immense scale, of surface paint, of bizarre coloration, of sensual hair, of a shut face. Coated in automotive and Glasurit paints, the bust holds a deep purple while the scarab's ghostly presence shimmers through pink, purple, blue, and green, ever shifting with the viewer’s own trajectory. In its synthetic finish, the surface invites a reading of 1970s petro-wealth, the decade when Gulf oil became a global power statement. Walking from the neoclassical facade of the Edmond J. Safra Synagogue on 63rd — its monumental bronze gates bearing the Tree of Life — toward this partly lustrous head, one moves between diametrically opposite mythologies of regeneration: one highly aesthetic, the other highly synthetic. Miró's primal and whimsical Moonbird at the 58th Street plaza of the Solow Building has long since surrendered its strangeness to familiarity. First Sun arrives with the same surrealist force but remains futuristic and eerie, as if pleading for its own textuality.

If First Sun arrives as a counter-monument in space, Al Qadiri's trajectory suggests it is equally a counter-monument in time, bypassing the traditional logic of permanence, heroism, and national memory. Having spent her formative years in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War, with its oil wells set ablaze and its skies darkened, she went on to spend a decade in Tokyo completing a PhD dissertation titled "The Aesthetics of Sadness in the Middle East.” This body of thought informs First Sun, her translation of the Gulf's history of petro-culture into aluminum and petroleum-derived pigments. The immediate catalyst was a visit to the Tomb of Pharaoh Ramses I in Egypt, where she discovered a painting of the scarab-faced god Khepri. The sculpture stands as the physical realization of this encounter: Khepri made flesh. On the south-east corner of Central Park, radiant turquoise from one perspective, violet-magenta from another, the scarab operates uncannily as opulence of chromatic shift. Its murky grey plinth rises as a proscenium, staging the iridescent visitation above. Echoing Khepri’s daily ascent from beneath the earth, this figure rises from its grey industrial base, carrying with it mankind's reckless and regenerative stances on petro-culture and its ecological consequences.

I missed the work's liminal logic until now: the scarab's placement upon the face, bizarre to waking eyes, follows the precise necessity of dream. The snow had arrived, dressed the park in its brief white silence, and retreated in my absence. On this second day of spring, I arrived to a different theatrical reverie — the work standing unburied, Martian, its articulated limbs and head asking to be seen on their own terms. Standing between the work and its posted text — and later, inevitably, a screen — this automobile-looking surface demanded an interrogation of our culture's socioeconomic parameters, while the monumental form insisted on a rethinking of facial identity — its sensual hair involuntarily evoking Zephyrus and Aura, the twin sources of a divine current of wind and breeze, both arriving simultaneously, neither waiting for the other. Whereas Jeff Koons attaches his mirrored gazing balls to classical figures as a tool for reflexivity, Al Qadiri loads her bespoke finish with ancient myth, our Central Park, and a singular career's own set of agendas that continue pressing upon issues of the inherent artificiality of gender and geopolitics. What felt like fever was never the weather — it was the sculpture's own conceptual demand, insisting upon the biographical, however embattled that word remains in the history of art theory.

Despite its fluid identity, the work does not stand alone — it arrives into a living dialogue of the monumental feminine, still forming, still contested. It shares the sentinel-energy of Wangechi Mutu's relatively recent guardians in the Met's niches of the outdoor facade, the radical identity fluidity of Lee Bul's practice — across gender, race, and the boundaries of the human — and Simone Leigh's Brick House in its unresolved and thus phenomenologically conditioned face. By erasing the literal face for a polysemic, multicultural, and irresolute one, Al Qadiri joins what was once and might still be a subaltern dialogue: incisive, displaced, pressing against the mainstream grid of Fifth Avenue. This participation transcends the ossified research of the archive for the visceral, gendered, and class-conscious reality of public space, closer in episteme to Caillebotte's rainy Parisian boulevard than to the museum wall.

Standing before Monira Al Qadiri's enigmatic head, I find myself within the intricate pressure of a dream episode — that threshold where mythology and surrealism cease to be literary agents and become physical phenomena. The scarab and the monolithic head of First Sun have not been merely fabled. The Egyptians believed the scarab emerged spontaneously from the earth: self-created and parentless. Hence this figure arrives as if autogenic, revealing the architecture of a human state caught between sleep paralysis and waking, between the mythological and the corporeal. In the sun, this sculpture is an anonymous bust; in the dark, it is the mind's substratum made visible. Here the phantasmagoria of Fifth Avenue and the naturalness of Central Park meet the dreaming body and Realpolitik. The stylized physiognomy of the insect conveys the iconography of the sacred scarab, taking on the value of an amulet central to the apotropaic tradition of ancient Egypt. Against geostrategy, petro-culture, carbon-logic, and overwarming, the scarab operates as it always has: a seal, a shield, a protection against what exceeds human scale. These forces converge in a single object that resolves only within a turbulent dream — whether personal or cultural.

Monira Al Qadiri: First Sun was co-commissioned by Public Art Fund and Lassonde Art Trail and presented at Doris C. Freedman Plaza, New York City, September 3, 2025 – August 2, 2026 and Lassonde Art Trail, Toronto, ON, September 10, 2026 – September 2027.