The artist, writer, and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria grew up in parallel worlds, moving between her mother’s liberal home in America’s Pacific Northwest, and her Bedouin family house in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar. That back-and-forth life is the subject of her 2012 memoir, The Girl Who Fell To Earth. Al-Maria has since branched into visual art and film, mediums in which she’s addressed the Middle East’s rapid modernization and the devastating effects of ecological change. Al-Maria’s first exhibition in Russia features two video installations: 2017’s Mothership, about a meeting with an alien in the desert, and 2019’s Beast Type Song, which takes on colonial erasure. —E.C.