04:00
Intended as a visual exploration of childhood expectation and fulfillment in the Arabian Gulf, Al-Bendari and the Bunduqia is a video installation by Qatari video-artist Sophia Al-Maria. The piece opens with the disembodied hands of a young boy twirling an Emirati gun on the roof of a house and ends with a young girl in a colorful jalabia disappearing into the seam at the center of the screen. Casting a rifle and a yellow rose as cartoonishly brash symbols of male and female, the gun and flower are then rhythmically superimposed over the moving images. In April 2008, Al-Bendari and the Bunduqia wss censored and forcibly removed by the Amiri Diwan in Qatar for unknown reasons after only two days of prominent display in the Doha Waqif Arts Center.