This presentation examines the transnational visual culture mobilized around raw material sovereignty and resource nationalism between 1950-1980, a period in which oil has played a significant role. Offering a visual ethnography of oil that is focused on the multimedia productions of the OPEC member countries from the MENA region in the form of promotional films, philatelic cultures, print publications, and magazines, I unpack the aesthetic production of oil in the nexus of decolonial visual cultures and transnational networks of solidarity in the wider MENA. This presentation addresses the emergence of new publics of value and media consumer culture while it charts out their competing and contradictory petrocultural visions through archival and textual analysis. Each of these media-oriented processes has responded to the task of nation-building and the formation of political dissent differently. I seek to map their commonalities and transnational affinities to analyze the disparate ideological frameworks upon which these diverse sets of petrocultural imaginaries and decolonial national aspirations were activated and circulated. The visual ethnography will center on archival materials pertaining to the multimedia and philatelic productions of the Arab Petroleum Congresses during 1950-1980 along with audiovisual commemoration projects devised and programmed by different OPEC members. ​This presentation further interrogates transnational dimensions of the representational politics surrounding oil, its historical conditions of possibility, and problematics. In doing so, it traces the processes of adoption and internalization of the Anglo-European ideals and ideas of petromodernity in disparate national modes of self-representation in the MENA region. I intend to examine representation as a contested area wherein modes and conditions of visuality are critically entangled with unequal power relationships and institutional dominance. I further ask how and why did the colonial visual logics continue to underpin the national adoptions of these representational regimes surrounding the oil industry?