Black Sun – Petroleum and Contemporary Art

Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name on view at the Villa Medici from October 9, 2026, to January 18, 2027, this catalog explores the dangerous liaisons between art and oil.
Black Sun. Petroleum and Contemporary Art 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 project 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…
Black Sun 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.
Organized into seven chapters, the book creates a dialogue between the works on display and a collection of previously unpublished texts by philosophers, art historians, and researchers, which shed light on the exhibition's key themes.