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Crude: A Symposium
To mark the closing weekend of the ‘Crude’ exhibition, the Jameel Arts Centre convenes a day long international symposium expanding on some of the exhibition’s central themes, providing an opportunity to engage directly with the rich and diverse research, thinking and writing that was instrumental in shaping the exhibition – through a series of talks, films and panel discussions.
The day’s first panel looks at material art histories, presenting approaches that rethink methods of the “social history of art” after the recent ontological/material turn. Foregrounding the historical agency of matter itself, the presenters will narrate the history of art, society and culture through material lenses such as coal, oil and plastic, asserting the undeniable material basis of the social condition.
Subsequent presentations will address the elusive literary genre of ‘petrofiction’, oil towns as petro-histories, and Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s trio of oil barrel works, the last of which is the yet to be realized Mastaba sited in the desert south of Abu Dhabi. Building on her commissioned work for ‘Crude’, artist Ala Younis’ lecture performance will present her ongoing research on the far-reaching impacts of oil on artistic, academic and intellectual life in Iraq. The day will end with a screening of two films by Shirin Sabahi about Japanese sculptor Noriyuki Haraguchi’s permanent installation at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Matter and Mind (1977).
Participants are curator Cuauhtemoc Medina, art historians Amanda Boetzkes and Morad Montazami, scholars Jeff Diamanti, Nelida Fuccaro and Graeme Macdonald, architect and researcher Tala Gharagozlou, writer Deepak Unnikrishnan, and artists Shirin Sabahi and Ala Younis.
Free; all welcome (but limited capacity) — please book a place in advance by emailing [email protected]
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