"Projects 97: Mark Boulos" Exhibition

The Museum of Modern Art

poster for "Projects 97: Mark Boulos" Exhibition

This event has ended.

Boulos’s installation "All that Is Solid Melts into Air" (2008), comprised of two large-scale videos, presents two communities on opposite ends of the world, each locked in a struggle to control oil. Oil surrounds us on a daily basis, and yet we are scarcely aware of its source or presence; when refined into products, petroleum gives no clue as to its origin or its physical form. Boulos’s installation, however, begins to make visible the mechanisms of this process of abstraction, and the political conditions that these objects conceal. In one video, Boulos shows traders in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on the first day of the 2008 credit crisis. In the other video, Boulos presents footage of his experience living with Nigerian fishermen—members of the militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which opposes through violent means the exploitation of people and devastation of the environment in one of the largest oil fields in the world. The individuals in these two landscapes are connected through a desire to control petroleum, which vanishes into thin air, in the first instance through financial speculation, and in the second through corporate regulation of Nigerian mines.

[Image: Mark Boulos "All That Is Solid Melts into Air" (2008) Two-channel video (color, sound), 15 min. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam. © 2012 Mark Boulos]

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Schedule

from March 19, 2012 to July 16, 2012

Artist(s)

Mark Boulos

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