Since the early 2000s, numerous artists originating from or associated with the Gulf (UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia) have turned their attention to the oil economy’s infrastructures that underlie the region’s rapid urbanization, not to mention the art institutions and foundations that support their own artistic practic. Some of these artists, such as Fatima al-Qadiri, Wael Shawki, or Lydia Ourahmane, constructed large, sensuous gallery objects that aimed to evoke oil’s materiality – its shimmering, otherworldly slickness. Many other projects, however, including sometimes by the same artists, turned to the petroeconomies archives as a source, in a move adjacent to and contemporary with the calls of (primarily Western) academics such as Szeman, Macdonald, and Wilson to excavate cultural histories of oil production. Works such as Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi’s Seep (2012-2013), an art installation and a magazine; Hajra Waheed’s The ARD: Study for a Portrait 1-28 (2018); or Manal Al Dowayan’s If I Forget You, Don’t Forget Me (2012) are all grounded in meticulous archival research on the one hand, and, on the other, make use of a giddy, speculative aesthetic to present their interventions into this archive. Such cross-generic projects straddle the boundary between conceptual art installation, research, and fiction. This paper questions the prevalent form that characterizes so many of the art projects engaging with the oil economy: hybrid, multidisciplinary, and excessive (to these one may add Reza Negarestani’s unclassifiable tome Cyclonopedia, at once a sci-fi novel, a philosophical treatise, and a geopolitical exposé). Aiming to contextualize this mode of art practice-as-research, I explore two directions: first, what Hanan Toukan identified as the meaning taken on by the term “contemporary” in a hegemonic neoliberal-cosmopolitan art scene, denoting a mode of largely conceptual art practice engaged in supposedly post-ideological subversion and “consensual dissent” (Toukan, 2021: 68-72). Secondly, I consider these works’ primary gesture – a speculative positioning of past archives – in relation to the financial tools of the petroeconomy, speculation and credit, and examine the temporal politics of their aesthetic practice alongside neoliberal political economy’s technologies for managing the future through relations of debt and finance.