An Incomplete Calendar

A forgotten musical record connects Caracas to Tehran, revealing untold stories of oil, not as a commodity, but as a political leverage for the liberation struggles in Palestine and building Pan-Arab solidarity between 1960-1970.

An Incomplete Calendar concludes a trilogy of essay films in which the artist and researcher Sanaz Sohrabi explores how visual cultures have developed in tandem with the history of oil extraction in Iran and Western Asia. The first two instalments, One Image, Two Acts (2020) and Scenes of Extraction (2023), drew in particular on images from the archives of BP (British Petroleum), created the purpose of promoting its colonial projects. This new film, however, takes as its starting point a musical document produced in Venezuela: in 1980, the Orfeón Universitario de la Universidad Central (Central University Choir) recorded an album to celebrate the 20th anniversary of OPEC (Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), which was created to counter the ‘Seven Sisters’ cartel and enable producing nations to regain control of their resources. Each track on Rhymes and Songs for OPEC draws on the folk repertoire of a member country, and its production is based on phonetic transcriptions, highlighting a promise of rapprochement between peoples. 

Drawing on this musical archive, Sohrabi tells a different history of OPEC: that of an axis of solidarity initiated in 1959 at the first Arab Petroleum Congress in Cairo, where, as a resource, oil was conceived not as an instrument of neoliberal domination, but as a political lever in the liberation struggles of the Global South, and of Palestine in particular. As part of its rich, multifaceted form, which rearranges elements from a previous installation, Sohrabi brings together various visual archives – records, stamps, letters, magazines, films and photographs – to map the political ambivalences arising from the clash between militant nationalism and decolonial politics between 1950 and 1980. At a time of widespread upheaval, An Incomplete Calendar is a timely intervention.

Antoine Thirion