After Oil (Bubian: There Once Was an Island)
Rania Ghosn
Lebanese, born 1977
El Hadi Jazairy
Algerian, born 1970
2016
An inkjet print on canvas that imagines Bubiyan as a drowned archipelago, with a geometric, stadium-like ruin left as a monument to oil-driven disappearance and change.
The image reads like a cinematic map—layers of fine horizontal lines stretch to a distant horizon while dark, blocky islands puncture pale water and tiny white birds and figures lend an eerie, small-scale stillness to the scene.
Combining architectural drawing and ecological fiction, the work uses speculative representation to probe how oil economies reshape coastlines, erase place, and rewrite collective memory.
Medium
Inkjet print on canvas
Dimensions
27 9/16 × 27 9/16 × 13/16" (70 × 70 × 2 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
Fund for the Twenty-First Century
Accession
56.2018.7
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
