2024
Video installation with laser etched crystal, acrylic awards, books, globe-shaped bookends, office table and chair, wall shelves, planter boxes, assorted plants and wallpaper
Sitting off the coast of Singapore are fleets of very large crude carriers that speak to the economic significance of the oil industry to the city-state. Yet, despite this being the first image that greets the visitor arriving into Singapore by air, oil rarely figures within prevailing imaginaries of the country which, ever since the success of a nationwide greening movement that began in 1963, is better known internationally as an ecologically conscious Garden City.
Conceived as a botanical-themed oil executive’s office, A Petropolis in a Garden with a Long View is an environmental installation that seeks to give visual form to this relatively inscrutable industry in Singapore by setting it against a scenography of the island city’s postcolonial repopulation by greenery. The work proposes that Singapore is more accurately described as a “petropolis in a garden”, as demonstrated by the selection of objects, books, images and videos within the installation that reflects the city-state’s involvement in the refining, storage, distribution and petrochemical businesses that have allowed it to become a global oil hub despite having no oil resources of its own.
The choice to situate this scenography within an office rather than an industrial facility further reflects the forms of mental labour involved in managing the production and distribution of a commodity as complex as oil, especially after the industry’s financialisation in the late twentieth century. Exemplifying the abstract nature of the products devised within an office as such are the scenarios that have been produced by Shell since the 1970s through a methodology pioneered by the company that involves devising plausible narratives about the future in order to anticipate future shocks. This “art of the long view”, as former head of scenario planning at Shell Peter Schwartz puts it, is represented in the installation by a series of fabricated books with the titles of different Shell scenarios from 1989 to the present indicated on their spines.
