The recent paradigm of petro-modernity takes oil as a political catalyst that plays out through expropriations, coups d'état or movements to nationalize the resource throughout the 20th century. As an intermedial tool, oil also links architecture, cinema, literature and art history to one another; and it presents a specific critical stream in museum history. How can we hence account for the emergence of petro-cultures and infrastructures within and outside the mainstream cultural industries and representations of the 20th century? How did humanity move from the golden age of oil economy and growth to our era of environmental crisis and collapsing ecosystems’ resilience?

Morad Montazami is an art historian, a publisher and a curator. After serving at Tate Modern, London, between 2014 and 2019 as curator “Middle East and North Africa”, he developed the publishing and curatorial platform Zamân Books & Curating to explore Arab, African and Asian modernism. He published numerous essays and curated among other projects Bagdad Mon Amour, Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris, 2018; Casablanca Art School, Tate St Ives/Sharjah Art Foundation/Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2023–2024; Arab Presences. Modern Art and Decolonization. Paris 1908–1988, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 2024.