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The Kuwaiti-based artist, musician, and composer has returned to Hyperdub to release an album inspired by classical Arabic female poetry. On Medieval Femme, Fatima al-Qadiri "invokes a simulated daydream through the metaphor of an Islamic garden, at the border between depression and desire, where the present temporarily dissolves, leaving only past and future."
Following the publication of the release of Shaneera for Hyperdub, Fatima recorded the soundtrack for the film Atlantics by French director and screenwriter Mati Diop, which won the 2019 Cannes Grand Prix. The restrained composition mixes drone sounds with the faint outline of an Arabic melody, bringing together the intense emotion of the film and the feeling of traveling between worlds.
The album Medieval Femme develops the ideas used on the soundtrack for Atlantics. It conveys the state of melancholic longing embodied in the medieval poetry of Arab women. Fatima seeks to transfer the listener to “a place of reverie and desolation, to question the line between two seemingly opposite states and rejoice in celestial sorrow.”
