What’s striking about a lot of art currently coming out of the Middle East, and the Gulf states in particular, is its relative…

What’s striking about a lot of art currently coming out of the Middle East, and the Gulf states in particular, is its relative lack of interest in tradition, reverence, continuity – all values that the west foists on other cultures. In her 2012 memoir The Girl Who Fell To Earth, Qatar-born film-maker Sophia Al-Maria, who has collaborated with Al Qadiri in the past, elaborates on her “Gulf futurism” theory: “If you think of history as something defined by the laws of physics, and the discovery of gas and oil wealth as a sort of event horizon from which there is no going back … what’s happened is a wormhole stargate mindfuck.”

The scale and intensity of the warp-speed modernisation programmes in so many Gulf states – their steel-and-glass citadels under baking hot suns, their labour camps full of imported labourers from Asia – are perhaps better chronicled by science fiction, video games and HD entertainment than by more traditional forms of journalism or sociology. “There’s been a generational quantum leap in Kuwait,” says Al Qadiri. “The houses are not made of mud any more, but of concrete. People don’t sleep on the roofs of their houses. There’s AC.

Fatima Al Qadiri: ‘Me and my sister played video games as Saddam invaded’| The Guardian