Surface Tension: A Field Under Extraction – Shayan Shadjareh
Surface Tension: A Field Under Extraction – Shayan Shadjareh
Surface Tension: A Field Under Extraction – Shayan Shadjareh
Surface Tension: A Field Under Extraction is a photographic project developed from an improvised journey from Tehran to Masjed Soleyman, Iran, in which I followed the oil pipelines that cut across the landscape toward Neftoon, a village historically tied to the origins of oil extraction in the region.
The work considers oil not as a hidden resource beneath the ground, but as a material that returns to the surface – staining water, soil, architecture, memory, and the body. Along the route, I encountered exposed pipelines, neglected wells, abandoned industrial structures, polluted streams, gas flares, agricultural fields, and communities living beside the source of a wealth from which they have been largely excluded.
The title refers both to the physical tension visible where oil and water meet, and to the social and political pressure held at the surface of the landscape. In Neftoon, the ground carries multiple histories at once: ancestral fields, industrial ruins, environmental damage, colonial and national systems of resource extraction, and the ongoing neglect of local life. The photographs move between documentary observation and poetic evidence, tracing an unstable boundary between beauty and contamination.
At the center of the project is a field under extraction: land that continues to be claimed, measured, burned, and used, while also remaining a place of cultivation, memory, and belonging. Surface Tension asks what happens when a landscape continues to produce wealth while the people, water, and soil around it are left to absorb the consequences.
Shayan Shadjareh is an Iranian artist working across sculpture, photography, installation, and material-based research. His practice examines how landscapes, infrastructures, and leftover spaces carry political and environmental histories. Informed by a background shaped by oil, industry, and pollution, Shadjareh is interested in the visible and invisible costs embedded in large-scale systems such as pipelines, industrial ruins, and urban infrastructures. Through documentary observation, spatial thinking, and material experimentation, his work investigates how pressure, extraction, memory, and neglect become legible on surfaces, objects, and bodies. He is currently a graduate student at the University of Lethbridge.
Date:June 13th, 2026 - August 21st, 2026
Location:Casa - Platform
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