Oil Candies 2019
Oil Candies tell a story of contemporary Saudi Arabia. An artwork that is engaged in the culture of Saudi Arabia could never pretend to exist outside of time. The core of the contemporary Saudi identity is a patchwork of mixed times; a place where past and present, tradition and modernity, time pockets and fragments of other cultures, coexist.
The work displays a series of crushed oil barrels. The barrels themselves tell a story of time travel – a journey from perfectly shaped cylindrical barrels to disfigured objects crushed and bleached by the desert sun. No longer in possession of their smooth cylindrical shapes, they have entered a new existence as disfigured objects. The barrels represent change, appropriated by the artist to tell a story of transformation. Oil barrels are, in a broad sense, the household objects of Saudi Arabia; they represent the financial foundation on which the current wealth and, by extension, everyday life in the country was built. Nevertheless, an important question related to time arises: Are oil barrels already objects of the past?
There is a distinctly playful almost decorative quality to the disfigured barrels, like empty colorful chocolate wrappings left behind after a party. They are traces of a sugar rush, of delightful consumption whose only evidence is a leftover waste. The candy-like sweetness of the consumption culture in its current shape has been facilitated by oil as an energy source and as a source of income that makes spending possible. However, if the cans are no longer able to exist as the perfectly-shaped objects they once were, then perhaps something much larger in an oil-based society is also about to change?
