Sea Art Festival 2023

            Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries, this year’s edition of the Sea Art Festival, is inviting us to rethink our relationship with the sea, referring to the beauty but at the same time, the fragility of our shores, and exploring alternative frameworks and visions for engaging with the ocean and marine environments.

            The sea is deeply embedded in our lives and capitalist society, a vital source for our survival, but also a vast industry we exploit for food, medicines, energy, minerals, trading, travel and so on. But increased human activity, from extensive cruise tourism, shipping and overfishing to nuclear testing, pollution and deep-sea mining have been plaguing the sea, having a huge impact on marine ecosystems and habitats.

            Instead of viewing the sea from the coast as a divided and abstract surface for moving around commodities, Flickering Shores, Sea Imaginaries reminds us that we are part of this body of water. This year's Sea Art Festival aims to explore new relationships with the sea and its ecologies, enabling spaces for cooperation, collective visions and synergies as a call to resistance and restoration.

Flickering Shores
Sea Imaginaries VIEW MORE

Artist

Rebecca Moss

                                            Rebecca Moss’s artistic practice explores notions of absurdity, precarity, and instability, and takes a variety of forms across different media. She is drawn to slapstick for its sense of reciprocity inasmuch as our surroundings can act back upon us because we are not always in control. She is inspired by slapstick performances and creates scenarios that stage interactions between human gestures and elemental forces, where an idea or gesture is humorously played out to the point of futility, chaos, or crisis.

SUPERFLEX

                                            SUPERFLEX was founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen. Conceived as an expanded collective, SUPERFLEX has consistently worked with a wide variety of collaborators, from gardeners to engineers to audience members. Engaging with alternative models for the creation of a social and economic organization, works have taken the form of energy systems, beverages, sculptures, copies, hypnosis sessions, infrastructure, paintings, plant nurseries, contracts, and public spaces. SUPERFLEX has been developing a new kind of urbanism that includes the perspectives of plants and animals, with the ultimate goal of moving society towards interspecies living. For SUPERFLEX, the best ideas might just come from fish.

Muhannad Shono

                                            Muhannad Shono is not limited to any one particular medium or scale. His multidisciplinary practice is catalyzed and structured by the story. Shono’s work harnesses the power of narrative by creating and contesting personal, collective, and historical truths. Impacted by childhood memories, throughout his early career—and right up until today—the aim and expression of his work are rooted in exploring both the existent and non-existent boundaries which have characterized his life. His works have been presented across the world, from intimate drawings and large-scale sculptural works to robotic and technological pieces, all of which illuminate a journey he would like to take us on.

Cho Eun-Phil

                                            Cho Eun-Phil uses blue as her main sculptural element to transform everyday materials into extraordinary and surreal spaces. With Cho, her blue is not just a color of physical materials; for her, each and every material is changed to blue and transformed into an illusionary space and a space of meaning. Her installations are a fundamental experiment about site-specificity and a challenge to it. These spaces allow not only the viewer but also the artist herself to experience unfamiliar moments. Recently, Cho has been working on a residency at Clayarch Gimhae Museum, with a particular interest in plant forms that change over time. She will be exhibiting at the Hangang Sculpture Project this year and at the Ichihara Lakeside Museum in Japan next year.

Shailesh BR

                                            With philosophy at its core, Shailesh BR’s work contemplates the world by examining existing knowledge, systems, traditions, rituals, metaphysics, and philosophy itself through methods of science, technology, and artistic intervention. The artist was recognized in 2015 with the Emerging Artist Award from the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, followed by a residency in 2016 at Atelier Mondial, Basel. He had a solo exhibition, Tarka at Vadehra Art Gallery, and The Last Brahmin at Villa Arson Nice, France. Shailesh has also exhibited at SAVVY Contemporary and the Armory Show, as well as numerous other galleries and museums.

Artwork

Birds

Merilyn Fairskye

How can we enable better public engagement and open, transparent debate about nuclear power and whether it is worth the risk?

Radioactive pigeons, two pairs of twins and a massacre bring chaos to a sleepy seaside village. In this environment everything is entangled —including birds, humans and plutonium — and nothing is spared.

With an aesthetic approach that emphasizes the act of creation and construction over a passive recording and reconstruction of the world, Birds humanizes the connections between the nuclear and the everyday at a time of great environmental threat and nuclear uncertainty, reminding us that we live in thepost-Cold War nuclear age.

Today’s world is marked by increasing anxieties around nuclear energy and risks, ongoing war, extractivism and violence. And after the Fukushima disaster, the war in Ukraine and political tensions and conflicts, we know that not only is the nuclear age still here, but unless we take action, the risk of a nuclear holocaust might be even greater.

Birds is inspired by real events that took place between 1998-2010 in the area around Sellafield, the large nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria, UK. Actors present different accounts as they were recorded in the media at the time. The imagery builds around the seaside and nuclear plant and accumulates and dissipates in a volatile environment where all forms of life are entangled. The overarching motif is the environment that the nuclear plant seeps into — land, sea and air — metamorphosing and mutating because of human actions and now, beyond human control. The birds are the constant presence, and unstoppable.

The actors’ voices are woven through a soundscape that gives a voice to the birds and to the environment. The soundscape was created by Meg Travers on a unique instrument she built, a 21st century version of the Trautonium. The original Trautonium, a 1920s German synthesizer, was used to create the non-musical soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds. Meg Travers is one of only two people in the world who compose for and play the Trautonium.

How can we enable better public engagement and open, transparent debate about nuclear power and whether it is worth the risk?

With an aesthetic approach that emphasises the act of creation and construction over a passive recording and reconstruction of the world, BIRDS humanises the connections between the nuclear and the everyday at a time of great environmental threat and nuclear uncertainty, reminding us that we live in the post-Cold War nuclear age.

Birds is inspired by real events that took place between 1998-2010 in the area around Sellafield, the large nuclear reprocessing site in Cumbria, UK. Actors present different accounts as they were recorded in the media at the time. The imagery builds around the seaside and nuclear plant and accumulates and dissipates in a volatile environment where all forms of life are entangled. The over-arching motif is the environment that the nuclear plant seeps into — land, sea and air — metamorphosing and mutating because of human actions and now, beyond human control. The birds are the constant presence, and unstoppable.

Moheet Derya Haeyang Ocean Ocean Ocean

Calypso36°21

Jane Jin Kaisen, Of The Sea, 2013, Single channel video, color, sound, 2min. 15sec.
In Of the Sea, the artist is seen walking along the black lava rock shore of Jeju Island where her mother and grandmother used to earn a living as haenyeo, women sea diver. She is carrying discarded items used for diving as well as the book Annals of the Jeju Haenyeo’s Anti-Japanese Resistance written by her grandfather while he served as Head of the Commemoration Committee for the Jeju Haenyeo’s Anti-Colonial Resistance Movement. The book was published in 1995 on occasion of the First Memorial Ceremony for the Jeju Haenyeo Anti-colonial Resistance, a movement that erupted in 1931-1932 when the haenyeo started marching in protest against the Japanese colonial forces along the same coast where the artist is seen walking almost eight decades later.
The video is juxtaposed with the song Song of the Haenyeo, the notes of which are printed on the first pages of the artist’s grandfather’s book. The song is composed around a Japanese melody, but the lyrics are altered and are written by Gwan-soon Gang, a social activist and leader of the resistance movement, while he was imprisoned. The song, although it was banned, was sung by haenyeo and attests to the gendered dimensions of Jeju haenyeo culture, the harsh and dangerous vocation of diving, and their reliance on the sea for survival.
While the careful treatment of the book and the diving tools allude to an attempt at preserving history and bridging the gaps in time and the transmission of intergenerational knowledge, the video ends before the artist reaches the sea. Walking with unsteady awkward movements and dressed in clothing and boots unfit for the environment, there is a sense of discontinuity and rupture, which stands in contrast to the lyrics of the song. In recent decades, haenyeo diving culture has drastically diminished due to modernization, societal changes, industrial farming and destruction of the oceanic environment. With it, the knowledge of the sea and diving, along with the matriarchal cosmology of Jeju and shamanic spiritual culture connected to the sea, is no longer being seamlessly passed on from mother to daughter.

Gilles Aubry, Atlantic Ragagar, 2022, Single channel video, color, sound, 31min. 43sec.
Shot in collaboration with biologist Younes Boundir, Atlantic Ragagar is an experimental film on seaweed and pollution on the Moroccan Atlantic coast. With its clear water, the Sidi Bouzid beach hosts dozens of seaweed species. Further south in Safi, marine biodiversity suffers from pollution caused by industrial phosphate plants. The film is an attempt to listen to coastal life, inviting the spectator into a process of ecological transformation. If pollution often remains hidden in the landscape, the effects of toxicity are rendered through the voice and bodily presence of the main character performed by Imane Zoubai. As she hums, sings, breathes, and silently interacts with algae, a new figure progressively emerges, “maouj”, an aquatic body open to transcorporeal and interspecies speculations.

Calypso36°21 & Derya Akkaynak, Untitled, 2021, Single channel video, text, sound, 9min. 4sec. Supported by Sea Art Festival 2023.
The sound piece Untitled (titled by Calypso36°21) was created by oceanographer Derya Akkaynak to explain to a large audience her discovery ‘Sea-Thru’. She records herself on her phone. Instead of narrating and explaining Sea-Thru in a scientific way, ‘objective’ and cold, Derya talks about the loss of her mother, her relationship to the sea and how those elements helped her make a huge breakthrough for the ocean. Derya gifted this piece to Justine Daquin in 2021 after a discussion they had together that was part of a larger project of interviews with female ocean scientists. They all approach their discipline with intuition and emotion and thanks to this way of practicing science, made major discoveries and helped heal and care for the ocean.

Jane Jin Kaisen(born 1980 in Jeju Island, lives in Copenhagen) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Spanning the mediums of video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. Through multi-year projects and collaborations, she has engaged topics such as transnational adoption, the Korean War and division, the Jeju April Third Massacre, and Cold War legacies. Another recurring focus revolves around nature and island spaces, cosmologies, feminist re-framings of myths, and engagement with ritual and spiritual practices. Her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance, and recognition, thus contouring alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.
Kaisen is a recipient of the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023) and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022). She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) alongside artists Hwayeon Nam and siren eun young jeong in the exhibition History Has Failed Us, but No Matter curated by Hyunjin Kim. She was awarded “Exhibition of the Year 2020” by AICA - International Association of Art Critics, Denmark for the exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Kaisen has participated in the biennials of Liverpool, Gwangju, Anren, Jeju, among others, and she had numerous solo exhibitions including recently Jane Jin Kaisen: Braiding and Mending at The Image Centre (2023), Of Specters or Returns at Le Bicolore (2023), Currents at Fotografisk Center (2023), Parallax Conjunctures at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2021), and screenings Dislocation Blues: Jane Jin Kaisen, Tate Modern (2023), Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022) to name a few.
She holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in Art Theory and Media Art from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Gilles Aubry is a Swiss artist, musician and researcher based in Berlin. His work explores sound and listening as embodied, technological, and ecological practice. His installations, films, performances and radio plays are presented internationally in art institutions, film festivals and music venues. Recent projects include The Gramophone Effect, a sound piece with Robert Millis and the Indian collective Traveling Archive, commissioned by Documenta14 (2017, Kassel and Athens); Black Anthenna, a performance with Nathalie Mba Bikoro for the Tuned Cities Festival (2018, Ancient Messene); Salam Godzilla, a film essay shot in Agadir on the 1960 earthquake (2019, FID Marseille), and The Whistle, a sound installation by the VACUT Group (Voices Against Corruption and Ugly Trading), commissioned by OTO Sound Museum in Zurich (2022).

Derya Akkaynak is a Turkish engineer and oceanographer whose research focuses on imaging and vision underwater. She has professional, technical, and scientific diving certifications and conducted fieldwork from the Bering Sea to Antarctica. Akkaynak was a finalist for the 2019 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists for resolving a fundamental problem in underwater computer vision—the reconstruction of lost colors and contrast which led to the development of the Sea-thru algorithm.

Stars On the Sea (S.O.S)

Jang Seungwook

Can art help us extend our empathy beyond what we know and see in our immediate surroundings?

Stars On the Sea is a story about the environment that surrounds us. A mother and her young children are seen in a domestic space, while the building is filling up with water. They are moving higher up in the building to escape the already flooded floors, only for more water to reach them. As time passes by, and they have now reached the top, they are trapped in what looks like a vast flooded landscape with floating dwellings.

Jang Seungwook is using human characters in his animation, but in fact they could represent any other living creature. This becomes more evident as the work progresses. For the artist, the situation the creatures face here is not much different from what any other living being would face, but what the main characters in the work symbolize is ultimately who we are.

It symbolizes us (human and non-human) who have no choice but to live on this earth. The environment, our planet is one of the important things we must pass on to the next generation. So, if we were in the place of the mother in this work, what would we do?

‘Noah’s Ark’ appears in the animation in one of the children’s story books. Rather than foreshadowing their salvation, it talks about the coming 'water crisis'. The ark symbolizes salvation in the book, but in reality, the characters fight through harsh conditions in order to survive. In one scene, the family watches TV at home, which presents part of a previous work of the artist. By including these scenes acted out by one character focused on himself and looking only at himself, it alludes to human selfishness.

Jang Seungwook created this work with sorrow and heartbreak, watching countless lives silently enduring the consequences of events for which they bear no direct responsibility. Through the images of those who appear like shining stars in the sky in the last scene, he wants to convey the responsibility we have as people living in this era, the affection, respect, and concern for disappearing creatures, and the hope that their images will not become ours.

Floating Fragments

Seema Nusrat

                                        What is the impact of our accelerated urban and suburban development on the environment, nature and heritage? How much more can urban development expand into natural habitats without disturbing the equilibrium?

Today, the world’s population is three times larger than in the mid-twentieth century, and in November 2022, the globe’s population reached 8 billion people. With increasing numbers of people also comes an inevitable growth and growing demand for urban development, and while cities become densely populated, they expand into rural peripheries.

Floating Fragments serves as a commentary on the swift and uncontrolled growth of urban development. With an increasing demand for space to accommodate a fast-growing population, the expansion of cities has not only disturbed the delicate equilibrium of natural habitats but it has also obscured our cultural heritage.

The artwork draws inspiration from local architecture, and in particular traditional roof tiles, presenting us with a partially submerged roof over water, and creating an unsettling perspective. This prompts us to reflect on the current trajectory we are navigating, highlighting the discord between urban development and the preservation of nature and heritage.

The artwork also calls attention to the risk of flooding, the impact of which is being felt in many areas and communities across the world, and is likely being exacerbated by climate change. As we continue to warm the planet with greenhouse gas emissions, and water warms and expands, and as sea levels rise, the frequency and intensity of extreme flood events,

Bricks from the Sea

Yang Jazoo

Just over 40 years ago, most houses in Korea were earthen houses. Before the Saemaul Movement - the political initiative launched in the 1970s to modernize the rural South Korean economy - demolished all the houses, the walls and ceilings of both tiled and thatched houses were all finished with soil mixed with rice straw and reeds. In these houses people communicated between the thin layers made of window paper, which functioned like windows today. In any country, town or city, traditional houses are constructed using materials easily found within their local surroundings. In Korea, such materials were soil, wood, stone, and rice straw.

Jazoo Yang has been interested in traditional Korean hanok and thatched houses and has been researching archives and other relevant sources about the rapidly disappearing earthen houses. During her research, she found out that there had been a type of dwelling in Busan using seaweed as a construction material. Many refugees, who moved to Busan during the Korean War in the 1950s, had to build temporary and quick shelters using materials that they could easily find within their local proximity. Therefore, during the war, instead of rice straw, one of the ingredients of traditional earthen houses, they mixed seaweed, the material easiest to obtain on the beach, with soil to build a house.

The artist, as part of an ongoing research, has been exploring the earthen houses made of seaweed remnants of which can be found in seaside refugee villages, including Yeongdo, Busan, in order to examine and understand the architectural and construction techniques of refugees, especially the methods of using seaweed and soil as building materials.

In her installation for the Sea Art Festival 2023, Bricks from the Sea, as in other of her artworks, Jazoo Yang incorporates these methods of using soil and seaweed into the construction of her work itself, bringing back to life a now-forgotten, but ingenious and creative frugal innovation.