VISUALISIERUNG DER EXTRAKTION

with SANAZ SOHRABI, PHILIP SCHEFFNER

Sanaz Sohrabi will continue her research on British-controlled oil operations in Iran as ADKDW artist-in-residence from November. The film screening Visualizing Extraction as part of her residency will showcase her research on how the political life of oil has contributed to global media culture, focusing on the relationship between petromodernity and the visual technologies used by British Petroleum in Asia.

📆 12 12 2023 | 8:00 pm
Filmhaus Cologne
Maybachstraße 111, 50670 Cologne
In English language
The room is steplessly accessible by elevator

Over the past six years, Sanaz has been working on a trilogy of essay films that uncover the relationship between the political economy of photography, archival technologies and the visual history of resource extraction in Iran. This project explores how the political life of oil contributed to global media culture while shaping the cultural aspirations of many postcolonial states in the global South.

The first two episodes of this trilogy, 'One Image, Two Acts' (2020) and 'Scenes of Extraction' (2023), have looked at the media and communications department of British Petroleum (BP), which was responsible for the production of ethnographic, industrial and propaganda films and photographs during its colonial operations in Iran between 1908 and 1951. During her time at the ADKDW residency in Cologne, she will be working on the final film episode of this trilogy, which explores how the visual cultures of oil were to guide the politics of nation-building on the one hand and the construction of transnational solidarity on the other after the withdrawal of Western oil companies. More specifically, the film is about the post-colonial visual politics of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) between 1960 and 1980.

The final episode of this trilogy tells a different story of OPEC, not only as an international energy organization, but also as a decolonial project that emerged at the same time as other transnational ideological currents in the era of global decolonization, such as the Non-Aligned Movement, which was founded one year after OPEC in 1961. OPEC's collective ideology constituted and conveyed an image of transnational oil that differed from previous colonial and imperial extractive logics. OPEC became a new "imagined community" of oil that required cultural representation. Newsreels and television appearances of the 'oilmen' representing OPEC member states were frequently used to disseminate this collective image, and the stamps issued by states to celebrate the anniversaries of independence from oil and the founding of OPEC became a popular means of spreading the anti-colonial visual slogans within and beyond their national borders.