Videostill from The Sea we See is not Blue by Sarah Kazmi
Mattering Oil
Artistic interventions at Teknisk Museum, Oslo.
Opening: 18.00 CET, 29 October 2021
Runs until 7 November 2021
A collaboration between PRAKSIS, The Norwegian Museum of Science and Tehchnology, and Goethe-Institut Norwegen.
Participating artists: Siri Austeen, Sarah Kazmi, Lasse-Marc Riek, Elly Stormer Vadseth, Geraldine Vanspauwen, and Maria Wang Kvalheim.
The extraction of oil and gas is one of the foundations of prosperity in Norway. Oil provides nearly 40% of the world’s energy needs and its consumption continues to rise. It underpins the livelihoods of millions of people and offers the raw materials for diverse products used in almost every area of contemporary life. However, oil is one of the largest causes of global environmental pollution, negatively affecting populations around the world. In this time of climate crisis, it is a focus of universal anxiety - a resource that it seems we can no longer afford to live with, yet for most people it is almost impossible to imagine living without.
Mattering Oil will temporarily transform the museum’s exhibition spaces into a creative gallery-laboratory for probing our relationship to fossil fuels; asking how can art challenge, and open new understanding of traditional narratives that surround oil? Throughout the museum, a series of performances and artworks will use sound to explore oil from cultural, historical and environmental perspectives.
The works on show will consider oil both as ancient matter and contemporary resource, mapping out its ecological relationships from the microscopically tiny to the macroscopic. They will reveal the sound worlds of oil and the sound pollution caused by its exploitation. They reflect on the transportation of oil over land and sea, and its movement through the ground, atmosphere and ocean, asking how our calculations, assumptions and fantasies about oil enable its continued extraction.
Partly inspired by the changes that the Covid-19 pandemic has enforced, the works will also point towards the changes that can ensue when we radically alter our lifestyles: avoiding air travel, minimising car use and turning our own homes and outside spaces into our workplaces and the centre of our lives.
Visit to experience new art works both as stationary and performative interventions. during 10 days: Mattering Oil takes place as part of the exhibition klima2+ and PRAKSIS residency 17 Climata - Capturing Change at a Time of Ecological Crisis.
