Iridescent Ways of Fueling Futures in Contemporary Art from the Arabian Peninsula

This paper explores the situated perspectives and artistic practices of imagining the Arab Gulf states as an "iridescent" projection of the world’s fossil- fueled dystopian development. Yet, these artworks also negotiate and investigate forms of nostalgia and collective memory of the “golden era” of petro-modernity. The promise of petroleum has been fueling imaginaries across Arab oil states since the beginning of its transformation into a globally traded commodity and, particularly, since the beginning of the oil export from the Arab Gulf states in the mid-20th century. Recently, contemporary artists in the Arabian Peninsula such as Monira Al Qadiri have been invoking petro-cultures’ aesthetics and visual power in the Anthropocene to register the disconnectedness between pre-oil and (post-)oil life worlds, the invisibility of petroleum and the everyday absence of the oil-industry-complex in order to reassess official and personal narratives and memories of living oil. Relying on artistic responses to the 20th century image world of petro- modernity that developed in the Gulf and discourses of “Gulf futurism”, I propose the concept of “iridescence” to conceptualize the aesthetic-visual ways in which petroleum invokes a complex value regime of (in)visibility and to investigate the forms of nostalgia and memory that are socially and artistically negotiated at the moment