Investigating Petro-Modernity: Between the Alternative Writing of Modernism and the Hypothesis of a Post-Oil Visual History. 

Morad Montazami

The research/writing/exhibition project is intended to be polymorphous and to generate several outlets. As part of this research and writing residency, I will aim to produce a historical essay on the one hand and a (more contemporary) exhibition project on the other. 
The writing of petro-modernity is intended as an investigation into representations of the oil industry, from the first Western oil companies to set up in Arab, African and Asian territory in the early 20th century, through coups d'état, revolutions and other oil shocks, to the more recent period marked by oil-related natural disasters and the global state of emergency; but above all through the cultural and museum infrastructures of West Asian and African countries in the 20th century. Taking oil as the subject of historical and visual questioning means redrawing a whole territory that heralds globalisation: that of the economic, political and migratory routes linked to oil, whether through its workforce or its representations in the arts, literature, film - and of course photography.