crude education juxtaposes two seemingly incommensurable filmic archives: British Petroleum’s 1908 newsreels capturing the company’s genesis in Masjed Soleyman, Khouzestan, and a 1996 home movie filmed by the artist’s cousin, documenting their first day of school in an American-built suburb on the outskirts of Isfahan, Iran. Through this pairing, crude education stages an unstable conversation across time, geography, and scale, exploring petro-subjects’ relationships with the camera as a mediating tool and the person behind it as an active agent in representation. The work traces a complex narrative of extraction and refinement—from the processing of raw earthly materials for consumption and political expansion to the social conditioning of children through education as a tool of control.

The video is part of an ongoing multimedia project that began during the artist’s fellowship at the Whitney ISP and continues to expand and evolve.

S Emsaki is an interdisciplinary artist, living and working bicoastally in the US. Their practice engages with material, historical, and ecological narratives of human and non-human petro-subjects. Emsaki is the 2024–25 recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program and a recent alum of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. They earned an MFA from Yale University and a BA from UC Berkeley, where they were selected for The Wendy Sussman Award and The Eisner Prizes in the Creative Arts.

Emsaki's work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, CA; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA; Westbeth Gallery, NY; and Gallatin Galleries, New York University. They’ve attended fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, NY; the Fine Arts Work Center, MA; The Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL; the ICA, and the Paul Mellon Center in London, UK.