October 3 – November 15, 2024, opening: October 2, 2024, 7 pm
AIL Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab

Oil constitutes one of the most important resources of the modern age in our global society.
In light of increasing planetary warming, we are on the brink of a radical transformation into a post-fossil era.
For a successful transition towards a sustainable future, understanding our present day culture in terms
of its entanglements with the oil industry is a prerequisite. The exhibition Reflecting Oil, part of the
eponymous artistic research project led by artist Ernst Logar, intensively explores the substance
in connection with various concepts and phenomena of our petromodernity.

The departure point for the exhibition are interdisciplinary workshops and crude oil experiments
in cooperation with the Montanuniversität Leoben (University of Leoben Department of Geoenergy,
formerly Department of Petroleum Engineering), the Petrocultures Research Group (University of Alberta,
Canada), and international experts from diverse fields of knowledge.

The exhibition investigates the fossil resource and its impacts on our society from various angles.
A holistic view of crude oil is needed to understand the substance in all of its facets. To this end, a focus
is placed on the perception of its sensual qualities (e.g. color and smell) and presenting crude oil experiments,
which Ernst Logar took as the basis for the exhibited artistic works (sculpture, installation, photography,
painting, video, and sound). In a separate exhibition area, the artist sheds light on how petroculture,
spurred by the crude oil refining process, influences global mobility, modern lifestyles,
and the world of consumer goods.

The featured artistic works reflect petrocultural phenomena in our contemporary culture.
In addition to Logar’s works, the exhibition showcases the artistic and scientific explorations
of the participants of the Reflecting Oil Colloquium (Angewandte, June 2022).
The results of the interdisciplinary research project provide important insights for the necessary social,
cultural, and technological changes towards sustainable energy sources.

Panel discussion: October 3, 2024, 7 pm
Oil, Petroculture and the Transition out of the Oil Age
Participants: Ernst Logar, Patrick Jasek, Alejandra Rodriguez-Remedi, Amanda Boetzkes
Moderation: Susanne Pöchacker

Accompanying Program

The exhibition will be accompanied by a program of interdisciplinary discussion events
with experts and artist tours as well as various art education formats.

Artist tours through the exhibition and perception of the qualities (smell, color, etc.) of various crude oils.
Dates: October 9, October 24, November 5, 5 pm

Lecture 9 Oct, 6pm by Reza Negarestani

The Blackened Specters of Depth

In the framework of the exhibition Reflecting Oil. Petroculture in Transformationand
in collaboration with Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures

Framed as a revisitation of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008),
a book in which the logic of petroleum extraction serves as a theoretical and fictional device
to connect the socio-political dynamics of the Middle East, the War on Terror, Capitalism,
and modern and archaic myths of creation, this presentation focuses on a different angle
concerning the cryptic tales of petromodernity or modernity at large. Petroleum or Napht
(from the Avestan word naftah, meaning a blackened moisture that suddenly conflagrates)
will be introduced within the tradition of alchemical works (L’Œuvre au noir, Marguerite Yourcenar),
their influence on painting practices, and the early psychoanalytic tradition as advanced by
the likes of Sandor Ferenczi and Otto Rank. The origin of the (petro-)modern subject of planet Earth
will be traced back to deep origins, where the nested concatenations of cosmological traumas
shape the figure of the contemporary human.

More information: https://ail.angewandte.at

The diverse experiments and artistic works were developed in the course of the arts-based research
project Reflecting Oil: Arts-Based Research on Oil Transitionings (FWF-PEEK Project AR547, 2019-2024)

Vienna team: Ernst Logar, Michaela Geboltsberger, Leonhard Gruber, Paula Bosbach,
Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi, Agnes Tatzber, Monika Vykoukal, Lisa Marie Weidl

Leoben team: Holger Ott, Karez Abdulhammeed, Pit Arnold, Bianca Brandstätter, Boris Jammernegg,
Patrick Jasek, Michael Koopmans, Jakob Kulich, Horst Resch, Gerald Stiedl,

Petrocultures team: Imre Szeman, Sheena Wilson