Scenes of Extraction – Critical Media Lab

Thursday, 4 April 2024, 6–8pm
HGK Basel, Studiokino
Freilager-Platz 1, 4142 Basel (Dreispitz)
High-rise building, ground floor

Sanaz Sohrabi will be joining remotely. Following the film screening, Sanaz will be in conversation with artist, Nadim Choufi.

All events of the series are in person and open to the public. No registration needed.

The film screening and talk is part of a series The Fire and The Song hosted by the Critical Urbanisms at the University of Basel in collaboration with the Critical Media Lab, FHNW presenting documentary filmmaking as a critical practice for researching nascent world systems.

Scenes of Extraction creates an archival constellation with the still and moving images of British Petroleum Archives, documenting the expansive colonial network behind the British energy complex that spanned across Iran, but also reached other British oil operations in South East Asia. It weaves through decades of archival documents to parse out the visual history of the “Reflection Seismography” method for oil exploration which was heavily tested across the Iranian oil belt despite its destructive and probable nature. Scenes of Extraction unpacks the relationship between the political economy of photography, archival technologies, and the visual history of resource extraction in Iran.
dir. Sanaz Sohrabi, 2023

Sanaz Sohrabi is a researcher of visual culture and artist-filmmaker. She works with essay film and installation as her means of research to explore the shifting and migratory paths between still and moving images, situating a singular image in a continuum of historical relations and archival temporalities. Sohrabi’s works have been shown widely in exhibitions and festivals.

Nadim Choufi is a visual artist. Primarily through sculpture and film, he explores how concepts of progress become alluring and the ways they materialize in people, land, and objects that live through or under their definitions. He uses notions of desire and hybridity from visual and literary practices to trespass categories of development that are often unquestioned.