DUBAI.- The Third Line will present HiLux, a new body of work by Sophia Al-Maria debuting at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar 2026. Through a newly commissioned large-scale scroll installation, works on paper, and an original shayla recording, the artist reconsiders the Toyota Hilux pickup truck as an intimate carrier of history, desire, and survival across the landscapes of the Gulf. The works expand on Al-Maria’s ongoing investigations into extractive modernity and embodied memory, reclaiming “Gulf futurism,” a term she coined earlier in her career to critique the rapid modernization of the region.

At the center of the presentation is a scroll that unfurls across the length of the booth. Painted in watercolor and acrylics, it traces a thorned, flaming, decal-like trajectory reminiscent of Gulf truck ornamentation. The scroll format evokes both infinitude and exhaust, echoing vehicle emissions, desert tracks, and the recursive loops of time that underpin Al-Maria’s thinking.

Accompanying the scroll is a constellation of smaller paper-based works that extend the Hilux’s iconography into emotional and speculative registers. Collectively, these works reimagine technical schematics as affective blueprints, positioning the Hilux as a utilitarian companion—one used to herd, to meditate, to carry people and ideas, and to make life possible across the desert—as opposed to a luxury symbol or a colonizing machine.

HiLux also features a newly recorded shayla—a contemporary, auto-tuned poetic form closely tied to Gulf car culture—written and performed by Al-Maria in collaboration with a local shayla artist. Traditionally tribal and masculinist, the shayla becomes a vulnerable elegy in the hands of the artist, folding environmental grief, defiance, and a hope for a more just world.

Presented in the context of Art Basel Doha, in response to the fair’s theme, HiLux offers a chance to reclaim narratives around Gulf identity, politics, and aesthetics—stories the artist feels were obscured through the globalization of “Gulf Futurism.” Rather than re-inscribing the truck into lenses of luxury or extremism, Al-Maria proposes a more intimate reading: the Hilux as a site of resilience and relational memory. To drive is not merely to move; it is to choose direction, to assert autonomy in landscapes designed to extract it.

Sophia Al-Maria (b. 1983, Tacoma, USA) is a Qatari-American artist, writer, and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, sculpture, video, performance, and experimental film. Grounded in storytelling, myth, and speculative fiction, her work constructs revisionist histories that foreground marginalized perspectives and challenge dominant narratives of progress, futurity, and globalization.

Raised between the United States and Qatar, Al-Maria studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo before completing an MA in aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, London. Her practice draws on Arabic poetry, pop culture, and ecological anxiety, with the notion of ruins—particularly as articulated in pre-Islamic poetry—serving as a recurring conceptual framework.

Al-Maria has presented solo exhibitions at Spike Island, Bristol (2024); the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2023); Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha (2022); Tate Britain, London (2019); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016). She has participated in major international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (2022). She lives and works in London.