OilScapes
OilScapes A Peacock Visual Arts exhibition curated by Zeigam Azizov and Janet Stewart. 22nd September - 27th October 2012 Zeigam Azizov, Peter Fend, Melik Ohanian, Aga Ousseinov, Owen Logan and Janet Stewart explore connections between oil, geopolitics and visual culture with particular emphasis on human mobility and the natural environment. Featuring an audio collage of voices from the University of Aberdeen’s Lives in the Oil Industry oral history archive.
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FOREWORD
Since 1975, when serious extraction of North Sea Oil began, Aberdeen has changed enormously. From a handsome provincial capital, already rich from its international port, its fishing and textile industries and its fertile agricultural hinterland it became the self styled ‘Oil Capital of Europe’. While the rich hinterland remains, Oil and its related industries now dominate the local economy. Oil’s influence on the people of Aberdeen has been profound. Because of this ‘Oil and the City’ is a recurrent theme in Peacock’s programme where artists, experts and the public are invited to engage with oil-related exhibitions, films and discussions. Past examples include Ursula Biemann’s investigation into the politics of oil in the Caspian region, The Black Sea Files. Focused on the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, Biemann related a specific local context to the wider global economy, in which Aberdeen plays a key role. Similarly, in Invisible Oil, Ernst Logar explored invisible aspects of the North-East’s oil industry from crude oil itself; to the disregarded plastic rubbish from platforms and supply boats. Logar’s large flotsam and jetsam platform sculptures, named after regeneration areas of Aberdeen, sought to highlight social inequality in the city and question the politics of oil and wealth. Continuing the theme, OilScapes is a project that explores connections between oil, industry and visual culture. The curators, Zeigam Azizov (Royal College of Art) and Janet Stewart (University of Aberdeen), have invited artists who approach two key ideas of human mobility and the natural environment: Peter Fend, Owen Logan, Melik Ohanian and Aga Ousseinov. Their work ranges from digitally encrypted oilfields, a photo-essay on the effects on communities with oil economies, a wind kite with a message on behalf of the Arctic and maps and models of an alternative renewable
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industry based on water-plants, to a conversation with Russians who live in Aberdeen and an audio piece of other transmigrants describing the flow of their lives along the routes of Aberdeen’s oil industry. Each work comments on and contributes to the cross-circulation of ideas along the routes carved out by the global oil industry. Each of the works and films in this exhibition is facilitated and motivated by oil. We live lives readily dependent on oil, so here in a city defined by oil, OilScapes connects us to the wider world commenting, resisting and challenging our understanding of this slick commodity. Angela Lennon Curator, Peacock Visual Arts Aberdeen, September 2012
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INTRODUCTION Zeigam Azizov and Janet Stewart
Oil is pervasive. Oil is elusive. These apparently contradictory statements articulate part of the paradox around which this exhibition is constructed. Few things we encounter on a daily basis are not dependent on hydrocarbons, from communication technology and transport to medicine, clothing and food. Yet oil remains a hidden component of these artefacts and processes. Oil is a lubricant; it reduces friction and encourages flow. Yet there is no shortage of friction in the politics of oil, nor is there any shortage of friction in the actual process of extracting oil from the ground or in extracting value from this process.
OilScapes begins with a view of oil that acknowledges its simultaneous visibility and invisibility and that grasps its dual role as a connector and divider that both facilitates and impedes the flow of commodities, images, people and ideas. It offers an encounter with the contemporary global oil industry and forms of visual culture associated with it, exploring the connections and disjunctions between two key ideas that might at first glance appear to be pulling in opposing directions: (human) mobility and the (natural) environment. It does so with the intention of providing a particular perspective on contemporary globalisation, itself a consequence of the ‘hydrocarbon age’ and our attendant dependence on oil. The perspective offered by OilScapes focuses on cultural flows and the cultural meaning of oil by exploring the relationship between the ‘ecology of oil’ and the ‘ecology of images’. Every day millions of tonnes of oil are traded across the globe, giving rise to vast flows of oil and capital. But it is not only oil and capital that circulate as a result of this trade; people, images and ideas also flow along routes put into place and maintained by the global oil industry. And so the
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oil industry motivates and facilitates the cross-circulation of cultures in the contemporary world, not least through the institutionalisation of mobility in organisations such as the World Energy City Partnership. This network connects Aberdeen, the city in which OilScapes originates, to other oilproducing cities worldwide, including Doha, Dongying, Halifax, Houston, Perth, Port Harcourt, Rio de Janeiro, Stavanger and Tomsk. Aberdeen, the self-styled ‘Oil Capital’ of Europe, is one key node in a complex network of global flows – of oil, of capital, of people, of images and of ideas – that both shape and are shaped by the environments in which they are immersed, environments of which oil itself is a constituent element. To think of oil as part of the natural environment focuses our attention on the consequences of our dependence on this resource. It also reminds us that although our dependence is a relatively recent phenomenon, to look at oil is also to look at the past, and not merely the recent past, either. As Timothy Morton puts it, oil is the ‘result of some dark secret collusion between rocks and algae and plankton millions and millions of years in the past.’1 Oil provides a material connection to that ancient past, as well as reminding us of more recent pasts such as World War I (the first war in which ships were fuelled by oil), the discovery of North Sea Oil, the oil price shocks of the 1970s, the Gulf Wars, and the invention of plastic. Grasping these many connections – geographic, historic, environmental, financial, cultural – is the task of the ‘ecology of oil’, where ‘ecology’ is used as it is taken up by Felix Guattari to mean the study of interconnections between complex sets of factors such as human subjectivity, the environment 1
Timothy Morton, ‘Unsustaining’, World Picture 5 (Spring 2011). http://www.worldpicture journal.com/WP_5/Morton.html
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and society.2 OilScapes contributes to the ‘ecology of oil’ by bringing together a number of artworks that offer distinct but related perspectives on the connectedness of contemporary global culture as it relates to oil. Each work comments on the flow, or cross-circulation, of images facilitated by the oil industry, while also contributing to that flow (and, potentially, providing resistance to it). In commenting upon and in a sense archiving the images that carry contemporary global culture, these artworks play a role in a process that Susan Sonntag described as the ‘ecology of images’, the recycling or conserving of images.3 The images that are recycled, meanwhile, are precisely often images of ecology. The title ‘OilScape’ is derived from the work of the cultural anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai, whose acclaimed book, Modernity at Large, offers a framework for understanding cultural globalization.4 Like Appadurai, we are interested in the construction of imagined ‘worlds’ as a response to the possibilities and challenges of contemporary social existence. To put this differently, we are interested in exploring the role that art and other forms of visual culture play in shaping and making sense of global culture and in helping to construct and articulate new ways of inhabiting the post-colonial world from the point of view of the global oil industry. Appadurai suggests that we would do well to understand our view of contemporary global culture as framed by a series of interrelated but disjunctive ‘scapes’. Each of these covers a different aspect of global culture: from flows of technology (technoscapes) and capital (financescapes) to migration and mobility (ethnoscapes), the flow of information of all 2 3 4
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Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. London: Continuum, 2008. Susan Sonntag, On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977, p.180. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
kinds (mediascapes) and the circulation of political imagery (ideoscapes). And each ‘scape’ looks different, depending upon the perspective from which we view it. Recognising and describing these ‘scapes’ is a way of making visible the multiple connections and disjunctions that characterise our experience of inhabiting the contemporary post-colonial world, an experience that gives rise to the new space for thought that Appadurai describes as ‘imagination’. We have coined the term ‘OilScape’ to describe a set of imaginary constellations made up of these distinct yet interrelated ‘scapes’ refracted through the lens of our multiple connections to oil. But the term as we employ it goes beyond Appadurai’s conception to also describe a physical entity – the environment, geography and geology of oil-producing regions – and a social phenomenon – the multiple relationships between human beings that are facilitated by oil. The individual audio-visual works and installation pieces on show in this exhibition are brought together as one such constellation that is intended to open up a new space for thought and dialogue around the central ideas of mobility and the environment in relation to oil and the oil industry. Seen in this way, the proliferation of images that characterises contemporary existence opens up new possibilities for showing the connectivity of the world, however unequal it might be.
OilScapes offers a lens through which to examine these connections and disjunctions and, specifically, through which to focus upon the role of visual culture in mapping and constructing (and re-mapping and re-constructing) the ‘imagined worlds’ of the ‘hydrocarbon age’.
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Aberdeen (in) Between Conversation piece (Luchino Visconti/18th century British painting) Difference Ethnoscapes Financescapes Global –cultural (cross-circulation of images) Human geography Ideoscapes Journey Kino-Glaz Local Mediascapes Network OilScapes Planetary consciousness Question of Space Russian Education and Support centre Slovo/Peacock Visual Arts (Irina Sementsova Tatiana Nevskaya Tatyana Argounova-low Alexander Sementsov Yuri Korchmar Alex Forbes ) Seagull (Anton Chekhov/Aberdeen Harbour) Technoscapes Universe of images (global) Village WWW XYZ}
2012, Zeigam Azizov
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Zeigam Azizov
Conversation Piece, 2012 (audio-visual installation)
Zeigam Azizov’s new work produced for this exhibition situates the idea of mobility and environments in Aberdeen itself. Conversation Piece, a multi-media installation, refers to the film by Luchino Visconti (1974) of the same title, as well as to the genre of the 18th century British portrait painting, which depicted informal groups engaged in genteel conversation. Azizov’s work presents conversation amongst a group of Russians who live in Aberdeen, many of whom have been drawn to the city because of its dominant oil industry. The perspective on the OilScape offered here draws attention to the way in which today the local is inevitably articulated by the presence of migrants and so suggests an understanding of oil cities as ‘translocalities’. Zeigam Azizov is an artist and cultural theorist who lives and works in London. His work addresses the global state of images and their possibility to re-articulate the critical position of the artist.
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Map 1: Area for Action, 2012, Peter Fend Map 2: Routes of Action, 2012, Peter Fend
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Peter Fend
Methane Economy Emerging on Peripheries of Gulf and Caspian Oil Fields: A Scenario from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Seas (installation: map and earthworks models, technical drawings of in-water rigs) Peter Fend’s installation, based largely on research and site-survey work through the Ocean Earth Development Corporation (founded 1980), presents a scenario for all-methane economies, convertible to only bio-methane, along two pathways straddling the world’s biggest oil & gas fields. He presents a plan of action: work with places which have largely-methane economies, like Armenia (75% of all transport fuel is methane); work also with places which have no major fossil reserves, and where there is a serious ecological challenge, like the Aral Sea; work with places with enormous bioproductivity, enough biomass to furnish renewable methane, like Socotra. Fend takes up the opportunity of energy transition explicitly, building on the ecology of oil (it comes from decomposed marine algae or other waterplants) towards a multi-site shifting of the energy landscape. It draws on personal knowledge, notably in the valley from the UAE to Masirah; of sand as crushed seashells, showing the oil-generating transformative capacity of the land itself. In mapping and modeling throughout the Gulf/Caspian region, in a swath from Cyprus to Somalia, in the area of most-intense oil & gas transport today, Fend presents a plan for an energy and resource transition – from fossils to biologicals. He calls on us to imagine how geographies and flows used by the oil industry in moving resources from basins outwards, might change in a post-petroleum era. Peter Fend’s architectural practice addresses the requirements of architecturetheorist Leon Battista Alberti: ‘assure, for the public, quality of air, water, urban circulation and defense.’ The work with renewable hydrocarbons and saltwater basins meet the first two requirements. Work with satellites helps meet the fourth. All work builds on agreements with prominent artists, to be conducted through the Ocean Earth Development Corporation (founded 1980, reformed 1994 and 2008).
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Peter Fend
After Oil, August
To escape global warming and desertification we build a hydrocarbon industry based solely on plants in the water, both fresh and salt. We start by removing freshwater plants from wherever nutrients collect, like dammed lakes. Around those lakes we make, in-flowing waters are absorbed in vegetation and moist soils. This prevents accumulation of soils and dry-out. Excess nutrients get flushed to the Ocean. There we install floating rigs for attachment of sea plants as well as shellfish so that the nutrients are absorbed in animal and plant tissue enough for regular trimming. The industry makes ecological systems, lakes and bays, abundant in species. We build the industry along bird migration routes. Given the huge wealth from oil & gas in the Gulf and Caspian Sea and given too the geopolitical stress, we build a bird flyway of renewable-hydrocarbon projects in this area, along the periphery – from just off Arabia to the Arctic. We build a string of water-borne plant harvesting practices, each yielding enough methane gas for local use on the cold water upwellings of the Arabian Sea, off Somalia, Socotra, Masirah, and Gwadar, with bladder kelp, the ligneous weed accumulating in Lake Hamoun and in the cold waters of the Kara Sea, with rope rigs of blade kelp, growing by sexual process under ice’s blue light.
Arab Springs, Persian Sinks, September The collapse of US credibility throughout Arabia and Persia sparked by the death of the US Ambassador to Libya (12th September, 2012) made the actions described above difficult in one area. All the region must be addressed. As the NY Times headlined ‘U.S. is Preparing for a Long Siege of Arab Unrest.’ We adapt the presentation. ‘Springs’ refers to the sources of water for sabkhas (salt flats) soon to be flooded from the sea. ‘Sinks’ refers to the inland salt lakes, throughout South West and Central Asia.
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As with the first Arab Springs we quote the Quran on what three government officials (two from Iran, one from Algeria) told us. They wanted a restoration of savannah, of greenery, to what is now desert. They asked for ‘an Islamic solution’ to war-torn regions and we answered ‘Islamic gardens.’ ‘A Sign for them is the earth that is dead. We do give it life and produce grain there from… and we cause springs to gush forth therein, that they may enjoy the fruits of this artistry’ (Ya Sin, chapter 36 of the Quran). That NY Times article goes on: ‘The upheaval has… suddenly become Mr. Obama’s most serious foreign policy crisis… it presents questions about central tenets of his Middle East policy: did he do enough during the Arab Spring to help the transition to democracy…?’ We say he did not do enough at all. He did not use anything like what had been asked by Islamic countries of US artists like Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer and this writer, Peter Fend, through Ocean Earth. Obama had no idea of what should be done: the preparation of the land for AFTER OIL, for a fertility and abundance not possible if you only go in to take out ‘black gold.’ The earthworks shown are now urgently on offer to the swath from the Sahara to the Aral Sea, from Socotra to Siberia. Thus we answer the question the dead-Ambassador had asked of his Arab friends: ‘Tell me more of what America can do to help, and why?’ We refer him to our answers to just this question from the Algerian Ambassador to France after seeing our satellite imagery of vast earthworks in the Iran-Iraq frontier: how do we begin a restoration of savannah, an Arabia Felix, in what is now ‘earth that is dead’? Oilscapes must become living landscapes. The models and drawings here say: build these.
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Owen Logan
Flammable Societies, 2011 (photo-essay)
Owen Logan’s photo-essay, Flammable Societies illustrates the place of the oil economy as a site – or set of sites – in which a visible political contest for meaning takes place around questions such as mobility (with its attendant pressing energy needs) and environmental concerns (linked to the issue of the transition from fossil fuels to alternative sources of energy). Part of an ongoing international research project on oil and development, Logan’s graphic photo-essay draws on ethnographic research carried out in the UK, Norway, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bolivia and Azerbaijan. Printed on large-scale banners, his work illustrates how the oil economy has increasingly become a prism in which the hopes and fears of modernity are expressed and fought over. Owen Logan is a photographer and a research fellow at the University of Aberdeen, where he worked closely with the ‘Lives in the Oil Industry’ oral history project. He is a contributing editor to Variant magazine, which covers ‘cross-currents in culture’. His work as a photographer has been widely exhibited and his images are in several public collections, including the Scottish Parliament. He is co-editor of Flammable Societies - Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas (Pluto Press 2012).
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Symbolic Contest, Owen Logan
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Melik Ohanian
Hidden, 2005 (video installation)
Recognising the simultaneous connection and disjunction between mobility and the environment is a key element of Melik Ohanian’s video installation, Hidden, which both comments on the invisible lines of connectivity between individual nodes in the OilScape and points to the larger question of the interplay of visibility and invisibility in the political ecology of oil. The piece consists of two shots of the sun setting over oilfields – one in Texas, the other in Baku. Only the former, however, is actually visible. The landscape of Baku is hidden within the digital image using a technique of encryption called ‘steganography’. It can be viewed only through the application of decoding software, and therefore can only be imagined by the viewer. By folding an invisible cryptic (message) image within a visible image, Ohanian demonstrates how images can be subverted and submitted to invisible media. More then that, his deciphering ability unveils this strategic invisibility, by removing even the last possible doubt: power means the power to remain invisible, to escape surveillance, vanishing within the new fields of visibility. Drawing attention to the limits of the visible, Ohanian’s work is also a reminder of the deceptive invisibility of human beings in debates about ‘the environment’ and the equally deceptive invisibility of the environment in studies of mobility and migration. Melik Ohanian lives and works in Paris and New York. His work can be primarily understood in terms of physical and conceptual territories that focus on the concept of time.
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Hidden, (2005), Melik Ohanian
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Aga Ousseinov
The Arctic Landscape (Innocent Version), 2012 (ink, pencil, collage and bamboo strips on paper) Aga Ousseinov’s work takes the form of a bi-partite kite, a device for carrying messages. Using the visual language of modernist travel posters, Ousseinov’s piece draws connections across continents and between past and present to situate tensions between mobility and the environment and concerns about the hopelessness of the contemporary human condition in the political aesthetics of the Arctic landscape. Aga Ousseinov is based in New York. His work in different media offers a critical aesthetic of scientific endeavour and industrial processes.
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The Arctic Landscape (Innocent Version), (2012), Aga Ousseinov
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Aga Ousseinov The Arctic Landscape
I create objects that appear as artefacts of past inventions, suggesting the imagined, yet not realised. These ‘inventions’ refer to my early life in the Soviet Union, where hopes for utopian progress were in overabundance. My interest in early travel posters also originated in my childhood in the Soviet Union. The government’s restrictions on travel abroad prompted children to imagine the rest of the world in a fanciful and fantastic manner. For us, maps as well as postal stamps and travel posters were a tool through which we could explore the World around us. My flying machines and ironic blueprints envision a world infected with a futile hope for progress. The absurdity and humour of these objects poke fun at ideological hubris, while affirming art as a space for imagining the impossible. Work on paper naturally serves as an important tool for me given my interest in scientific diagrams, blueprints, inventions and imagined machines. All of my sculptures begin with an investigation in drawing, where I thoroughly explore sculptural ideas. These traces of the thinking process serve as an important part of the final product as I intend to articulate a world that is being proposed and in flux. The sculptures themselves incorporate the language of drawing. The objects hover between the conception and its realisation, whereas drawing and sculpture serve as metaphor for the provisional nature of imagination and utopian yearning. In this case, the wind kite is an ideal model through which to realise my ideas. Technically, it stands at the intersection between drawing, 3D object and flying machine and is a great contraption to deliver a clear, poster-like message. The piece addresses the current situation through reference to the past. Right now the World is experiencing total helplessness in just about
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every aspect of life: in politics, international relations, finance, healthcare, energy, climate change, education, and so on. As a result, there is a complete failure of conservative and liberal values. In this sense, the current exploration of the Arctic embodies the helplessness in areas of social, political and business activities. On the one hand, this is expressed in different governments’ need to use energy as a mechanism to escape the economic crisis. On the other hand, it also shows the failure of the alternative social activists in their hope to save the planet from natural catastrophe in this last corner of the Earth.
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Janet Stewart
No Place, Like Home: Mobile Lives in the Oil Industry, 2012 (audio installation) Janet Stewart’s audio collage brings together a set of voices from the University of Aberdeen’s Lives in the Oil Industry oral history archive that reflect upon experiences of mobility. The work constructs a set of imaginary dialogues that narrate the experience of the ‘oil diaspora’. The voices are: Robert Henry Ballantyne, Robin Charles Cornah, Robert Hamish Dingwall, Alison Jane Patricia Goligher, William Joseph Pike, Sir Robert Paul Reid, Sjoerd Francis Schuyleman and the interviewer, Hugo Manson. Janet Stewart is an academic who lives and works in Aberdeen. She is currently working on a research project exploring ‘Cultural Responses to the Dilemmas of the Hydrocarbon Age’.
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EVENTS AND FILM PROGRAMME All events at Peacock Visual Arts, 21 Castle Street, Aberdeen, unless stated otherwise. EVENTS
Artist’s Talk, Saturday 22nd September, 4pm Peter Fend will discuss where and how one can economically move beyond mineral-hydrocarbon industry. Professor Andrew Hurst (Shell Chair in Production Geology), Owen Logan (artist) and Professor John Paterson (Oil and Gas Law) will respond to Peter Fend’s talk ahead of general discussion with the audience. Meet The Artists, Wednesday 17th October, 7pm Join us for an opportunity to meet artists and curators from OilScapes. Zeigam Azizov, Aga Ousseinov, Owen Logan and Janet Stewart will take part in a conversation chaired by Lindsay Gordon, Director of Peacock Visual Arts. Workshop, Thursday18th October, 9:30 - 6pm This workshop aims to discuss questions of environmental sustainability and mobility, with a particular emphasis on the role of visual culture. Speakers include David Inglis (University of Aberdeen) Janet Stewart (University of Aberdeen), Zeigam Azizov (Royal College of Art) and the artists, Aga Ousseinov and Owen Logan. University of Aberdeen Library, Meeting Room 1 on Floor 7 Places are limited - to book please RSVP to j.stewart@abdn.ac.uk
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ARTISTS’ FILMS SCREENING Wednesday 10th October, 7pm
Petrolia (2005) Emily Richardson, 21 mins Naft Sefid/White Oil (2005) Mahmoud Rahmani, 16 mins Oil/Neft (2003) Murad Ibragimbekov, 6 mins Civilization (2009) Murad Ibragimbekov, 5 mins Dead Reckoning (2012) Stephen Hurrel, 13 mins The Dubai in Me - Rendering The World (2010) Christian von Borries, 78 mins Auris Lecture Theatre, University of Aberdeen FILMS
Gasland (2010) Josh Fox, 107 mins Sunday 23rd September, 6pm Belmont Picturehouse Lessons of Darkness (1992) Werner Herzog, 50 mins Saturday 29th September, 6pm Belmont Picturehouse Oil Rocks - City Above The Sea (2009) Marc Wolfensberger, 52 mins Wednesday 3rd October, 7pm Auris Lecture Theatre, University of Aberdeen
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THANKS TO:
Kaveh Abbasian, Tatiana Argounova-Low, Craig Barrowman, Terry Brotherstone, SiobhĂ n Convery, Alex Forbes, Andrew Hurst, Yuri Korchmar, Andrew MacGregor, Hugo Manson, Tatiana Nevskaya, John Paterson, Alexander Sementsov, Irina Sementsova, Paul Thompson, Lighthouse Field Station, University of Aberdeen, Belmont Picturehouse, Russian Education and Support centre SLOVO, Aberdeen, School of Language and Literature, University of Aberdeen and School of Social Science, School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, Library, Special Collections and Museums at University of Aberdeen.
This publication is available to download as a pdf from www.peacockvisualarts.com
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