Extrait du film Human Energy, 2023 © Jessica Segall

The exhibition explores the impact of oil on contemporary artistic practices and on our imaginaries, reshaped by modernity. Conceived as an exploration of the dangerous relationships between art and oil, it brings together works that question the way in which the oil industry has determined power dynamics between North and South on the basis of extraction of natural resources, particularly in the postcolonial period.

From the construction of refineries, pipelines, and offshore platforms to revolutions, coups d’état, oil crises, and climate catastrophes, the artists in the show, including Nancy Holt, Monira Al Qadiri, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Jananne Al-Ani and Ana Alenso, offer an entire visual and critical history of petromodernity. Oil emerges less as a mere resource than as an active force, a set of material and symbolic flows running through the works; or even as a cosmological system, a dramaturgy of natural or chemical elements that influence politics, economics, urban planning…

The exhibition examines both the strategies employed by oil infrastructure facilities to render themselves invisible and how they are staged for aesthetic or ideological purposes. It underlines the convergence between artistic practices and militant practices that come together to confront “fossil imperialism”, in the words of the thinker Andreas Malm, and to envisage a post-oil world.

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