Petro-Ghareebo: NAUSEA is a CGI animated video that is split into five distinct but related scenes and is presented as a multichannel installation.
"I created a virtual world populated with transhistorical subjects and objects of material culture and cultural heritage. Manipulated 3D scans of Fossil Rock and archaeological sites from Sharjah create the environment in which augmented-reality creatures coexist with pre-Islamic figural artifacts from Sharjah, spaceships, dune-bashing cars, desert tents made of crustacean limbs, militarized cyber dogs, and more.
Layers of manipulation, translation, and defamiliarization, produce the uncanny alternate reality of this world. An excavation site turned abandoned parking lot, becomes a multilayered site, suggestive of real-world practices of commercialization of historical sites. Ancient artifacts are fused within decaying cars, serving as a more complicated relation between time, history, and material culture. The experience of this world oscillates between the familiar and alien, comfort and nausea, rational and absurd - an ultra-contemporary experience of our contradictory world and time.
The cinematography features alien, endoscopic, rollercoaster, and drone-like POVs/shots, creating a vertigo-inducing effect in viewers, experiencing the scenes simultaneously around them. The multichannel installation creates a feeling of navigating through different parts/paths of a virtual environment similar to playing a video game. This reality is fragmented with glimpses of cross-contamination between scenes, seen via sneaking and peaking objects and subjects."
