Still, El Ouardani persistently scours Kuwait City for war remnants, discovering a card game portraying Iraqi leaders played by American soldiers. In “The Grass is Greener on The Other Side” (2023), she catches glimpses of a country veiled by futurism, detached from the ground and projected into the sky. The card game is a rupture in the veil, and a car adorned with Kuwaiti leaders’ portraits becomes a shrine to those responsible for this willful amnesia.
Despite this erasure, America’s ghost persists in Kuwait’s hypercapitalism, with shopping malls and fast-food joints, mainly employing migrant workers, serving as the nation’s agora. In Kuwait, the future is now, and migrants are building it. On “Prospects,” El Ouardani shares portraits of the hopeful men borrowed by the Gulf yet never integrated into its society, recognizing her grandfather’s life trajectory, a Moroccan guestworker in the 1960s Netherlands.
To observe Kuwait, one of the world’s hottest inhabited places, is to face the blinding blaze of its sun, a brilliance so intense it compels eyes to avert their gaze. Through these photographs, El Ouardani refuses to look away.
