“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time.” J.G. Ballard’s commentary opens and sets the tone for Qatari-American artist Sophia Al-Maria’s The Future was Desert I and II, two videos that pursue the artist’s interest in exploring the visual and aural aesthetics of deep time and post-human time in the Gulf Region. Depicting the intricacy between fossil-fuel dependency, wealth, and environmental devastation, Al-Maria creates a set of delirious, post-apocalyptic dreamscapes in which past and future appear as arbitrary temporal references within a complex geopolitical landscape. Description by Bar Laika.