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© Melik Ohanian
Hidden, 2005
© Melik Ohanian
Hidden, 2005

Oilscapes

Peacock Visual Arts Aberdeen  •  Scotland [SC]

Welcome to OilScapes, an exhibition of the work of five international artists – Zeigam Azizov, Peter Fend, Melik Ohanian, Aga Ousseinov and Owen Logan; also featuring an audio collage, with voices from the University of Aberdeen's Lives in the Oil Industry oral history archive.

The exhibition explores connections between oil, geopolitics and visual culture with particular emphasis on connections between human mobility and the natural environment.

The programme of events will include a workshop and artist's talk and a number of film screenings. These screenings will take place at the Belmont Picturehouse and Aberdeen University, and include Werner Herzog's Lessons of Darkness (1992).

OilScapes/Film delves into artistic responses to the ecology of oil, exploring the connections and disjunctions between (human) mobility and the (natural) environment as they are shaped by the global oil industry.

From the Cromarty Firth to small-town Pennsylvania, from Oil Rocks (Stalin’s city of oil rigs built in the Caspian Sea) to the building sites of Dubai, these works bear testimony to the cross-circulation of oil imagery that makes connections between disparate locations and across time. Many of these works also reflect on their own materiality as it relates to oil, meditating on questions of sustainability, decay and entropy, and so attending to the ecology of images.

Screenings take place in the Belmont Picturehouse and at the University of Aberdeen (Auris Lecture Theatre)

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