PublicationNotes #15

Among the Bakhtiari, the Indigenous people of the Zagros mountains, the words for “oil” and “nose” are written the same way: (نفت) which can be read both as “noft” (nose) and “naft” (oil). For a people whose land has been devastated by oil companies since the first oil was struck in the western lands of the Bakhtiari region in 1908, oil is sensed by the body. This is, to borrow the Gramscian term, a southern question. While in the north, in the center, in Tehran, the extraction of oil has merely been a matter of political economy, in Bakhtiari it is part of people’s lived and bodily experiences.

One recurrent slogan when people of the south protest is: “The only thing we have received from the oil is walking on pipelines.” Some of those who grew up walking on pipelines became authors, filmmakers, and artists who tell stories about life shaped by the promises and failures of oil. What does life look like under the shadow of petroleum? What is the legacy of the oil for the people who face its disastrous consequences but do not get a share of its benefits?

Amin Roshan (b. 1982) and Hamzeh Farhadi (b. 1982) belong to this generation. They are two young artists from the south. Both born in the early 1980s, they grew up with parents and grandparents who worked for the oil companies. For these young artists, oil has been a significant part of their daily life. Oil is emotional and personal. Life itself has been impregnated with oil. Working with oil and about oil is just a continuation of their childhoods playing on pipelines.

The gloomy sky in Farhadi’s paintings leaves no escape from despair. Sometimes it feels like
the sky catches fire. Fire is unavoidable in Khuzestan. Natural gas from the oil wells has been burning since he was born. High, raging flames at oil extraction sites can be seen from everywhere. In a series of sculptures, he turns pipelines into domestic interior decoration. Sculptural table lamps that do not illuminate are testimonies of the failed promises of the oil: it cannot bring light into life. Roshan is more explicit in showing the impact of oil on the Bakhtiari’s past ways of life. In some of his works, Roshan uses vintage blueprints from an oil company as the backdrop for his artworks. In others, he uses diluted crude oil on canvas or old photographs of nomadic Bakhtiaris. Roshan’s and Farhadi’s works are visual depictions of the eco-apocalypse that the people in Khuzestan and Bakhtiari are struggling with today. They exhibit vandalized forms of life, failed promises of modernization, and a stolen future.

Dispossession of land and extraction of underground resources in the south has led to the flourishing of the north. For instance, the wealth from oil financed the establishment of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in the 1970s. The National Iranian Oil Company provided funds for its collections of national and international items. Interestingly, a permanent feature of the museum is a work by the Japanese artist Noriyuki Haraguchi (1946-2020). Called Matter and Mind (1977), it is a large, black, reflecting pool of oil.

The relationship between the people in the south and the oil is melancholic. It is perhaps what the author Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism”: something that you desire and believe will protect you is actually an obstacle to your flourishing, or even a threat to your wellbeing.¹ Oil becomes cruel when it prevents people from reaching security, happiness, and wellbeing, all that has been promised in a petro-economy.

The oil is undoubtedly what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject,” that is, a phenomenon with an enormous impact on our lives, yet of such scale that it extends beyond our limited spatial and temporal understanding.² To comprehend what the oil has done to us, we need new modes of thinking and radical encounters with it. This issue of mohit.art NOTES is a such attempt. This issue is dedicated to the oil.