Sophia Al-Maria’s exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery—in which two films are separated by a thick PVC industrial strip curtain, one screened in a room painted black, the other white, one rooted in the future, the other the past—is the culmination of her position as the gallery’s writer in residence. Over the last year, the artist organized a series of associated events (intended specifically for women and non-binary guests) that correspond with the rhapsodic narrative texts written for the Whitechapel website: “We Share the Same Tears,” “We Swing Out Over the Earth,” and “We Ride and Die With You.” Al-Maria was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which posed an alterative, non-linear, feminist form of storytelling realized through speculative fiction. In the essay, Le Guin writes that the first useful tool for humans is a carrier bag for food—“a leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container”—rather than the “sticks and spears and swords” of masculine domination. For her, the carrier bag becomes a metaphor for the telling of multiple stories that resists the narrative of the “bashing, thrusting, raping, killing” …