crude education 1908 - ongoing

Exhibited and screened at Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, NY, NY; Gallatin Galleries, New York University, NY; aashra of Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon.

crude education 1908–ongoing is an archival video work that intertwines personal and geopolitical histories to examine the entanglements of extraction, ideology, and visual documentation. The work juxtaposes two distinct archival sources: family footage of first graders’ inaugural school day in 1996, filmed on the northern outskirts of Isfahan, Iran, and images from the National Archives Catalog documenting British Petroleum’s first successful oil strike in the Middle East, in Masjed Soleyman at the foothills of the Zagros Mountains in 1908.
Through a poetic visual lexicon and a micro/macro juxtaposition, the video frames the mundane as monumental, revealing how the infrastructures of empire infiltrate the intimate rhythms of everyday life. crude education draws attention to the origins of petro-imperialism in the region, mapping its long reverberations through systems of displacement, economic dependency, political ideology, and educational formation.
The film is also a reflection on the evolving language of documentary cinema—from the silent, black-and-white fixed camera of colonial survey footage to the handheld camcorder capturing the textures of familial intimacy. In doing so, it asks what is preserved, what is omitted, and how visual records shape our understanding of both history and its narration.

Part of an ongoing multimedia project, crude education 1908–ongoing continues to expand and mutate, offering a layered meditation on power, pedagogy, and the uneven legacies of modernity.