Soleil Noir
Black Sun
Exhibition catalog
Zaman BooksAcadémie de France à Rome - Villa MédicisDirected by Caroline Courrioux, Madeleine de Colnet, Morad Montazami
10.2026
Prices : 29€
The book is available at Villa Medici bookstore and on the publisher's website.
An exhibition and a catalog designed by Morad Montazami, Madeleine de Colnet (Zamân Books & Curating), and Caroline Courrioux (Villa Medici), offering a visual and political critique of the concept of petromodernity.
Featuring the artists: Jananne Al-Ani, Latif Al Ani, Monira Al Qadiri, Ana Alenso, Ismaïl Bahri, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck & Media Farzin, Bernardo Bertolucci, Rossella Biscotti, BP, Alberto Burri, Chloe Dewe Mathews, Aref El Rayess, Fouad Elkoury, Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly, Mehdi Ghadyanloo, Lungiswa Gqunta, Robert Gschwantner, Jacqueline Hassink, Isabelle Hayeur, Romuald Hazoumè, Michael Hirschbichler, Alexandre Hogue, Nancy Holt, Jumana Manna, Alessandro Marchi, Anita Molinero, Anahita Norouzi, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Shirin Sabahi, Behjat Sadr, Latifa Saeed, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Jessica Segall, Allan Sekula, Hassan Sharif, Robert Smithson, Thu-Van Tran, Jala Wahid, Hani Zurob
Featuring works by:
Lotte Arndt & David Castañer, Laura Hindelang, Stephanie LeMenager, Andreas Malm, Salar Mameni, Amina Adebisi Odofin, Justinien Tribillon.
Bilingual book (French and English)
Format: 22 x 35 cm.
264 pp., 90 ill.
ISBN 9791093781136
From October 9, 2026 to January 18, 2027, the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici will be presenting the exhibition Black sun: Oil and Contemporary Art, which continues the series of events launched by Villa Medici in 2022.
Following Stone Stories, inspired by Roger Caillois, and then The Song of the Sirens, devoted to water, this new exhibition uses the theme of oil to address the question of artworks in the era of global warming and of our civilization burning.
More specifically, the exhibition explores the impact of oil on contemporary artistic practices and on our imaginaries, reshaped by modernity. Conceived as an exploration of the dangerous relationships between art and oil, it brings together works that question the way in which the oil industry has determined power dynamics between North and South on the basis of extraction of natural resources, particularly in the postcolonial period.
From the construction of refineries, pipelines, and offshore platforms to revolutions, coups d’état, oil crises, and climate catastrophes, the artists in the show, ranging from Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Robert Rauschenberg to Monira Al Qadiri, Zina Saro-Wiwa, and Ana Alenso, offer an entire visual and critical history of petromodernity. Oil emerges less as a mere resource than as an active force, a set of material and symbolic flows running through the works; or even as a cosmological system, a dramaturgy of natural or chemical elements that influence politics, economics, urban planning…
The exhibition examines both the strategies employed by oil infrastructure facilities to render themselves invisible and how they are staged for aesthetic or ideological purposes. It underlines the convergence between artistic practices and militant practices that come together to confront “fossil imperialism”, in the words of the thinker Andreas Malm, and to envisage a post-oil world.
This exhibition is also the result of the long-standing dialogue that the Villa Medici maintains with its former residents. It builds on the research carried out by Morad Montazami, a resident in art history at the Villa Medici in 2023–2024, during which time he developed his work on ‘petromodernities’, which now forms the core of this exhibition.
