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 this substance in connection with various concepts and phenomena of our petromodernity.
The departure points for the exhibition are interdisciplinary workshops and crude oil experiments in cooperation with the Montanuniversität Leoben (University of Leoben Department of Geoscience, 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 resource fossil 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 has taken as the basis for the exhibited artistic works. 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 this interdisciplinary research project provide important insights for the necessary social, cultural, and technological changes towards sustainable energy sources.
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 Abdulhameed, Pit Arnold, Bianca Brandstätter, Boris Jammernegg, Patrick Jasek, Michael Koopmans, Jakob Kulich, Horst Resch, Gerald Stiedl
Petrocultures team: Imre Szeman, Sheena Wilson
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)
Ernst Logar (*1965 in Klagenfurt, Austria) is an artist and cultural worker, active in the fields of photography, film, video, sound, sculpture, and installation. In addition to international exhibition activities and interdisciplinary collaborations with various experts and institutions, Logar realizes projects in public space and site-specific works that tackle prevailing power relations as well as contemporary historical, sociocultural, ecological, and socio-political phenomena.
His works have been presented in the Austrian Parliament, at the scenes of Nazi crimes, and other locations relevant to his artistic engagement. Logar is active in local cultural politics and is currently a research assistant and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
All images: Lea Dörl