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Shifting Terrains: Art, Environment and Urbanism in Iraq
  • ISSN: 2515-8538
  • E-ISSN: 2515-8546

Abstract

The Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) played a paradoxically contentious and constructive role in the development and distribution of Iraqi modern art and visual culture during the twentieth century. During the 1950s and 1960s, the IPC sponsored a wide-ranging public relations platform that not only advanced the company’s agendas but also opened spaces for Iraqi artists, writers and thinkers to articulate their own cultural ideologies. In its publicity campaigns, the IPC often triangulated oil, antiquity and modernity into narratives of sociocultural progress to promote its brand. This article explores how the Baghdad-based editors of the IPC’s reformulated this vision of Iraq’s ancient and modern history to fit within the locally constituted cultural trends, fashioning into a cultural journal that circulated a nationalist vision of Iraqi modernism.

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2021-03-01
2026-01-25
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/content/journals/10.1386/jciaw_00041_1
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Floating on oil and antiquities: Iraq Petroleum, Al Amiloon Fil Naft and Iraqi cultural modernism
Journal of Contemporary Iraq & the Arab World 15, 85 (2021); https://doi.org/10.1386/jciaw_00041_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jciaw_00041_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jciaw_00041_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): antiquity; heritage; journals; Modernism; petroleum; visual culture

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