Panel 8 (Red Salon/ Volksbühne)
The Petromodern(s) – A Retrospective
With Alexander Klose (DE), Benjamin Steininger (DE).
The situation is conflicting: we must say goodbye to coal, to oil, and to gas, but we have not come to understand the impact it would have on our lifestyle, our subjectivity, our position on the planet.
Since 2016, Alexander Klose and Benjamin Steininger have explored the complexities and paradoxes of petromodernity as ↗ the collective "Beauty of Oil" all geographies and on all scales, from the molecular to the planetary, from the concrete to the abstract must be considered in conjunction.
In particular, the arts reflect the political to subjective through lines of the era. From the speed frenzy of the Futurists to the contemplation of new petrochemical materials, from the ironic celebration of consumer culture in Pop Art to the fervent opposition to the excesses of this very way of life, from New Objectivity to the new documentaries of the last 20 years, from the Oil Encounter in (post-)colonial countries like the Middle East, Venezuela and Nigeria to the equally reshaped mother countries of industrialization in the East and West. What kind of petromodernity does a petrocultural comparison reveal?
The two provide insight into the methods and criteria they used to publish their 2020 book "Erdöl. Ein Atlas der Ölmoderne" (Petrol. An Atlas of Petromodernity) and their ongoing exhibition "Oil. Beauty and Horror of the Petrol Age." This world's first retrospective on the art of petromodernism can be seen at the ↗Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg until January 9, 2022.
Alexander Klose is a cultural theorist, curator, and concept developer based in Berlin. His interests focus on the interplay between technologies of communication and transport, and processes of social (re)formation. Between 2001 and 2009, he undertook an artistic and scientific research project on the principle of standardized containers and the rise of logistical organization and thinking. Since 2015, he has been working with the Office for Precarious Concepts Berlin.
Titles:
• Oil. Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age, Catalog, 2021
• Erdöl. Ein Atlas der Petromoderne (Petrol. An Atlas of Petromodernity), 2020
Benjamin Steininger is a cultural theorist and historian of science and technology living in Vienna and Berlin. He works as a researcher at the Cluster of Excellence UniSysCat of TU Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. In his dissertation thesis, Steininger analyzes the history and theory of catalysis in the 20th century. From 2012 to 2016, he headed a collaborative research project on the history of the Austrian oil industry.
Titles:
• Oil. Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age, Catalog, 2021
• Erdöl. Ein Atlas der Petromoderne (Petrol. An Atlas of Petromodernity), 2020