Senegal-born, Kuwait-raised composer and conceptual artist, currently based in Brooklyn, New York. As a child growing up in Kuwait in the 1990s, Fatima Al Qadiri had the kind of utopian access to global entertainment that still seems out of reach in the West, even in today’s golden age of boundless media. Thanks to Kuwait’s lenient piracy laws, she and her sisters were able to beam in cartoons and versions of MTV from every corner of the globe, absorbing a glut of information that instilled her with a worldly curiosity and a sensitivity to foreign culture that informs the expansive work she does today as a visual artist and producer.
Rather than share the media-saturated days of her childhood in a maximalist outpouring, however, Al Qadiri crystallizes her rogue education into precise, refined works. Following a trio of EPs—Desert Strike, Genre-Specific Xperience, and WARN-U, an homage to Muslim anthems that she recorded as Ayshay—she’ll release her debut album Asiatisch through Hyperdub on May 5， The record, which toys with Western perceptions of China in pop culture, is both Al Qadiri’s most conceptually ambitious and cohesive release yet; she’s taken her trademark minimalist bass sound and delicately woven in uncanny references to Asian culture as filtered through a deeply American lens，