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
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Artist

STUDIO 1750

                                            STUDIO 1750 (Kim Younghyun, Son Jinhee) is a project group that expresses freedom without any restrictions concerning materials or locations, and adds artistic imagination to everyday life. Their works are mainly based on the theme of a hybrid culture that originates from reality and the transformation of everyday objects, examining questions ranging from trivial curiosities to the unknown future. They propose to see things differently by shifting the meanings, perspectives, and functions of objects, while at the same time deconstructing/reconstructing various cultures and transforming/reorganizing everyday objects. They currently live in various places around Korea, engaging in bold initiatives for change and continuing their experiments to expand the framework of art.

Emma Critchley

                                            Emma Critchley is an artist who uses water as a formal material property in a range of media, including film, photography, sound, installation, and dance. Her work explores the underwater environment as a political, philosophical, and environmental space, and has been shown extensively nationally and internationally in galleries and institutions, including the official Italian pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. Her current project, Soundings, explores how film, sound, and dance might be used to connect us with the deep ocean to help foster the meaningful connection needed to inspire care for the deep sea and its ecosystems.

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.

Ari Bayuaji

                                            Ari Bayuaji was born in Indonesia in 1975 and immigrated to Canada in 2005. Dividing his time between Montreal and Bali, the artist is known mainly for his art installations, which incorporate found and ready-made objects from different parts of the world, thereby exposing himself to the different mechanisms of cultures. In almost all his artworks, Bayuaji has consistently used found/old objects from around the world as the material and subject matter. He is an expert in conveying aspects of daily life, as his works usually try to show the overlooked artistic value in everyday life through objects and places, and their roles within society.

Yun Pil Nam

                                            Based in Busan, Yun Pil Nam has participated in eight solo exhibitions and more than 50 group exhibitions at leading art institutions in Korea. By moving from the flat surface to three dimensions, Yun strives to express a world of art that goes beyond the superficial boundaries of painting, which can bind the past, present, and future together. Since 2016, she has been particularly interested in installation art and has also participated in creating theater costumes and public art projects.

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.

International Waters

Rebecca Moss

Who governs or makes the rules in international, globalized waters and what are the implications for seafarers and labor conditions?

In August 2016, Rebecca Moss was selected for the 23 Days at Sea artist residency program, run by Access Gallery in Vancouver. Traveling on the Hanjin Geneva container ship from Tokyo to Shanghai, Moss planned to cross the Pacific Ocean and arrive in Shanghai 23 days later. However, one week into the residency, the shipping company Hanjin was declared bankrupt, meaning that the individuals and cargo were stranded at sea on a ship which was unable to pay to get into any docks. Ports around the world barred the shipping company’s vessels from docking fearing that the bankrupt company will be unable to pay for port and service fees.

Moss, the only artist on board, two passengers and the crew of Geneva, dropped anchor 13 km from the coast of Japan, in international waters, and waited for over a fortnight for further instruction.

Maritime transport is still the backbone of international trade and the global economy, as over 90% of the world’s goods - including most of the things we consume, from gadgets, electronics and other appliances to fruit - are transported by sea. International Waters is a single channel video work made in response to being stuck at anchor and makes visible the largely unknown, but at the same time ubiquitous world of the global shipping industry. It is also a reminder of the harsh and often unfair working conditions for seafarers. Apart from Geneva, hundreds of other ships in the company’s fleet were also affected, with crew and cargo remaining stranded in the sea for a while.

Rebecca Moss through her work tells the absurd story of the bankruptcy from the perspective of the people on board the stationary ship full of goods and cargo but suddenly without a destination, and combines interviews and news reports from this time.

Plastic Mandala: A Pattern for the Cycle of Life

Eunhae Jung

Eunhae Jung and Zune Lee have collaborated on this installation creating mandala patterns from small and micro-ocean plastics generating visualizations of the earth’s frequency.

The plastic fragments have been collected from Hamden beach on Jeju island, in five years of activity collecting ocean plastics with volunteers and members of ECOOROT, an eco-art organization founded by Eunhae Jung. The mandala patterns here are generated using the Schumann Resonance - a series of resonating electromagnetic waves, driven by lightning activity, also known as the Earth’s “heartbeat” or “hum”.

Thunderstorms roll over Earth producing about 50 flashes of lightning per second and creating electromagnetic waves captured between the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere. Some of these waves combine to create a repeating atmospheric heartbeat or the Schumann resonance, an extremely low frequency at an average of 7.83 Hz.

Scientists have discovered that variations in the resonances correspond to changes in the seasons, solar activity, or activity in Earth's magnetic environment and other Earth-bound phenomena. There are theories that the earth’s vibrations are rising which can cause us anxiety, and although there is not hard scientific evidence for this, this theory emphasizes that we are most calm when our brain waves overlaps with the earth’s vibration, so maybe, the Schumann Resonance is a reminder of our connection and close relationship with the Earth.

Eunhae, since her childhood, wondered what this ever-present low sound was, which she was able to hear when everything else was quiet, but recently realized that many people can’t hear it.

Eunhae and the ECOOROT participants kneeling on the sand, stroking it with repetitive moves collecting microplastics while hearing the ocean sounds in the background, become part of a visceral experience that feels like a ritual or prayer. In the mother’s womb, the sound was experienced through tactile receptors. Sound was the touch.

The inspiration of Plastic Mandala came from the Tibetan Buddhist ceremony, where monks create a beautiful and colorful sand mandala for days to weeks, and when it’s complete, they dismantle it. Then they carry the sand, blessed and now blessing itself, and pour it into a nearby stream of water so that it will be flown into the ocean and to all living beings connected through the one ocean that connects us all.

The artwork expresses a sense of despair facing our plastic culture and the wish to bless the ocean by taking plastic out of the ocean. The artwork is complete when it is dismantled. It will not be turned into something new, useful, or permanent.

You can watch a video from a Plastic Mandala made by ECOOROT participants here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjd1t9OWC2I&t=302s

THIS IS NOT A GOOD SIGN

J.R. Carpenter

Climate change can sometimes feel far away and distant in both space and time, but what does it take to pay attention?

THIS IS NOT A GOOD SIGN is an augmented reality (AR) poetry project and site-specific installation by J. R. Carpenter & Tomo Kihara. The web-based augmented reality component of the project uses AR to overlay the user’s surroundings with 3D-modeled signage posing questions about past and present climatic conditions. ‘Why is the sky so blue?’, ‘Has it always rained?’ These signs call attention to the small changes in the climate already occurring all around us, inviting playful responses.

THIS IS NOT A GOOD SIGN was originally commissioned by Now Play This, a festival of experimental play design, in 2021. New signs have since been created responding to the specific themes of exhibitions at the Digital Design Weekend at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Everything Will be Fine exhibition in Berlin. ‘Time rivers under us.’, ‘It’s fine.’

For the Sea Art Festival, Carpenter & Kihara have created five new physical signs, with texts in Korean and English, which respond directly to the environmental conditions of Ilgwang Beach. Together, these signs form a poem:

sea rises early.

air falls heavily.

here wind lives.

swift ground shifts.

salt seeps into our dreams.

Experience these signs in person on Ilgwang Beach, or through the web-based AR app (https://not-a-good-sign.com/) anywhere in the world.

To See a World in a Grain of Sand: Unveiling South Korea's Hidden Narratives

Atelier NL

Have you ever looked closely at a grain of sand? Imagined it as a small part of the world, with its very own story to tell?

The journey of a grain of sand has been guided by water, wind, and ice over time. Just like people, each grain has its own character and tells a unique story of the land and history. It is also one of the most important materials in our lives. Without it, we would have no glass, no computer chips, and no buildings.

To See a World in a Grain of Sand is a project that maps the Earth through small sand samples contributed by people worldwide, revealing hidden narratives embedded in glass fused from 'wild' sands. From a hot and dry desert to a cold and snowy mountain; a skyscraper in a bustling city to an archaeological ruin; an invisible political border to a vast and open landscape; an excavated gold mine to the bottom of an ancient seabed; or a place of civil unrest to a serene holiday island. When these geographical diversities become visible, it becomes clear that sand carries not only ecological significance but powerful social and political histories.

Specially curated for the Sea Art Festival, Atelier NL delves into South Korea's history. In the intricate tapestry of our planet's story, sand stands as a silent witness to the passage of time, shaped over billions of years. Yet, this seemingly abundant resource faces an urgent global crisis - a scarcity driven by insatiable demand.

Every year, we remove billions of tons of sand from beaches, rivers, oceans, and quarries across the planet, locking it away in infrastructure and technology. This makes sand one of the most quickly disappearing natural resources in the world, so much that there is now a global sand scarcity.

Amidst these global challenges, South Korea stands at a crossroads. As a rapidly growing nation, it must strike a delicate balance between ambitious development plans and safeguarding the environment. Busan's skyline of towering skyscrapers showcases the magnitude of sand's role in construction. It serves as a poignant reminder that sustainable sand management is crucial to support the city's growth while preserving the natural beauty that surrounds it. This installation invites you to see the world anew, where the humble grain of sand carries stories of our past, present, and future.

The collected sands, mainly gathered by Bora Hong, a multidisciplinary designer from Seoul now residing in Chiang Mai, are visualized on the map of South Korea. During her 10-day road trip, she collected sands from diverse beaches along the coastline. Exploring rivers and little streams led her to unexpectedly beautiful and tranquil locations. Bora's involvement with "aworldofsand.com" allowed her to uncover sands with profound stories and memories reflecting the country's rich cultural heritage and natural beauty.

Alongside Bora's captivating journey, Atelier NL categorized each story and place into six themes: history, migration, meaning, ecology, delay, and scarcity, providing a unique perspective on the sands' significance and the memories they evoke.