Description:

Please join us for MENA Monday.  Lunch will be provided.  The event will be held in person, a Zoom option is available on request.

Title: Unearthing the Substrata of Images: Specters of Oil and Counter-Archives of Extraction in Iran

In this talk Sanaz Sohrabi will address her current artistic practice and doctoral research.  She engages with the British Petroleum photographic and film archives from its operations in Iran during the first half of the twentieth century.  She investigates the relationship between petro-modernity and photography and film as embedded technologies of coloniality.  Sohrabi will speak about the relationship between political economy of photography, archival technologies, and the visual history of resource extraction in Iran.

Sanaz Sohrabi (b. 1988, Tehran) is a research-based artist and award-winning filmmaker.  She is currently a  doctoral candidate at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University in Montreal.  Her doctoral research consists of a trilogy of essay films, multimedia installations, and video lectures.  Her most recent work, Scenes of Extraction, was commissioned by the VOX Center for Contemporary Images in Montreal.