49. Global Modernism and the Hydrocarbon Economy: Pipelines, Tankers and Artistic Imaginaries

This panel interrogates the ways the infrastructure for the extraction, transportation and refinement of crude oil and natural gas shaped artistic production in the second half of the twentieth century globally. In recent decades, the ongoing global environmental crisis has prompted artists and art historians to revisit the binary between culture and nature, critiquing the extraction of fossil fuels as part of what is often described as the ‘ecocritical turn’.

The discipline has increasingly recognised the links between modernist experimentation and petroleum production since the early twentieth century, when companies such as British Petroleum commissioned artists and film makers to promote the ascendancy of oil over coal. Yet, for many governments in the mid-twentieth century, the hydrocarbon economy became a key site of both anti-colonial national development and transnational cooperation. From realist prints in Mexico to abstract postage stamps in Algeria, artists celebrated the expropriation of oil infrastructure from foreign corporate interests. Part of a similar cultural shift, in 1950s Italy, art exhibitions, cultural events, and documentaries commissioned by the National Hydrocarbons Company (ENI) promoted oil deals with North Africa and West Asia in a wider politics of solidarity with formerly colonised countries. As development increasingly came to resemble dependency, in the 1970s and 1980s artists and cultural practitioners continued to grapple with a shifting oil imaginary globally.

This panel invites papers interrogating the way the infrastructure associated with the hydrocarbon economy (pipelines, tankers, natural gas and crude oil) was represented and reimagined by artists in the second half of the twentieth century. We are especially interested in contributions investigating the relationship between artistic form, petro-politics and post-colonial histories.

Themes: Global modernism; hydrocarbon economy; oil imaginary

Additional format comment: 20-minute papers.

Lead Convenor: Connie Sjödin, University College London, United Kingdom

Co-convenors: Giulia Morale, St John’s College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

To submit a Paper to this Session, please follow the guidance on our website and complete the AAH 2027 Call for Papers Proposal Submission Form.