Between 1901 and 1951, the British controlled oil operations in Iran expanded their geological expeditions and geophysical methods for locating commercially viable oil reserves across its entire oil concession. “Scenes of Extraction” takes the viewer on an archival stroll into the British Petroleum Archives to unearth the still and moving images that documented this expansive colonial network of geological explorations that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil concessions in Papua and South East Asia. Reading the political economy of images in relation to extraction of crude oil, “Scenes of Extraction” evokes the history of imperial and colonial extractive industries in relation to the history of photography and archives, both as embodied technologies of extraction and dispossession in and of themselves.
Do 25 Apr 2024 | 17:00–19:00
Scenes of Extraction
Film Screening, followed by a discussion with the artist Sanaz Sohrabi and Alia Mossallam (EUME Fellow), in cooperation with Allegra Lab
Online event
Sanaz Sohrabi is a researcher of visual culture and filmmaker. Sohrabi works with essay film and installation as her means of research to explore the shifting and migratory paths between still and moving images, situating a singular image in a continuum of historical relations and archival temporalities. Since 2017, Sohrabi has done extensive archival research at the British Petroleum archives to engage with the history of photography and film practices of the British controlled oil operations in Iran, conducting a visual ethnography of resource extraction in relation to the media infrastructures of BP.
Sohrabi’s works have been shown widely in solo and group exhibitions and festivals including: Berlinale Forum Expanded, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Iran Cinéma Vérité Festival (Winner of International Mid-length), IndieLisboa (Silvestre Section Best Short Film), Valdivia International Film Festival Chile (Special Jury Mention), Mimesis Documentary Film Festival (Best Documentary Short), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Jury Award), Montréal International Documentary Film Festival (RIDM), Sheffield Doc/Fest, Kasseler Dokfest, Videonale, VideoEX Zurich, FIDBA Argentina, among others. Sohrabi’s recent solo and group exhibitions and commissions include Ljubljana Biennale (2023), SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal, Centre Clark, and Carpintarias de São Lázaro, Lisbon.
Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, educator and writer interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. For her PhD she researched a popular history of Nasserist Egypt through the stories and experiences of the popular resistance in Port Said (1956) and Suez (1967-1974) and the construction of the Aswan High Dam through the experiences of its builders and the Nubian communities displaced by it. As a EUME fellow 2017-21 of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, she worked on her book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it. Her new project at EUME (2021-24), “Tracing Emancipation Under Rubbles of War”, retrieves the physical and political journeys of Egyptian and North African workers on the various fronts of World War I through the songs and memoires that recount their struggles. Some of her research-based articles, essays and short-stories can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Ma’azif, Bidayat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya and 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh”, as well as having taught at the American University in Cairo, the Freie Universität in Berlin, and continuing to teach at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts.
The event will take place online. We kindly ask for registration via Allegra Lab. The event is organized in cooperation with Allegra Lab's AnthroKino.
The event is part of the BEYONDREST Conversation Series “Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm.” Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661). More information on the project and the conversation series can he found here.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
