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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.
Liquid Time (Jacob Bolton & Miriam Matthiessen), a research duo working around shipping, finance, and the temporalities of maritime worlds, was established in 2023. Jacob Bolton is an architectural researcher interested in supply chain violence and resource struggle. Miriam Matthiessen is a researcher interested in critical logistics and urban political ecology. Together with Eliza Ader, they also run the Abandoned Seafarer Map, an online (counter)-mapping project tracking the systemic abandonment of seafarers by ship owners and the shipping industry at large.
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Félix Blume is a sound artist and engineer using sound as a basic material in sound pieces, videos, actions, and installations. His work is focused on listening and inviting viewers to a different perception of their surroundings. His process is often collaborative, working with communities and using public space as the context within which he explores and presents his works. Blume has participated in international festivals and exhibitions such as Thailand Biennale, Tsonami Arte Sonoro, CTM Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, LOOP Barcelona, The Belluard Bollwerk, and Sonic Acts.
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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.
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Jang Seungwook currently works as an animation director in Reims, France. Winner of prizes at several international festivals, including IndieJúnior – International Children’s and Youth Film Festival in Portugal, In The Palace International Short Film Festival in Bulgaria, ShorTS International Film Festival in Italy, and Digicon6 ASIA Korea Regional Awards in South Korea, he is also expanding his artistic horizons by working as a children’s book author and illustrator.
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While our oceans already face a huge amount of stress from climate change, plastic pollution, oil spills and over fishing, how can proposals for sea floating dwellings be sustainable or non-threatening to marine ecosystems?
Seasteading, the concept of creating dwellings floating at sea, colonizing oceans and bypassing territories controlled by governments, has been around for a long time. Floating structures anchored in international waters, beyond the "territorial sea" of any country, have included refitted oil platforms, modified cruise ships, or custom-built floating islands and structures to name a few.
Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Daniel Keller’s film The Seasteaders documents the first Seasteading conference in Tahiti, talking with Seasteading evangelists like controversial author Joe Quirk and Seasteading Institute executive director Randolph Hencken to get firsthand accounts of the Seasteader’s beliefs and visions for an aquatic future. While much remains to be worked out, not least of all the fundamental problem of the place of “shesteaders,” the Seasteaders hope they can float on changing tides as they colonize the world’s waters.
Founded in 2008 by former Google software engineer Patri Friedman with financial backing by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, the Seasteading Institute envisions a fluid world, where governments are selected in an open market and climate change can be “hacked.” Seeing rule by the majority as ineffective and oppressive, the Seasteaders propose a libertarian future of floating micro-governments, where user-citizens can detach and rejoin at will and law looks less like constitutions and more like software. To implement their plan for a nautical future, the Seasteaders have begun working with the government of French Polynesia to build the first floating islands in a special economic zone off the coast of Tahiti, after facing large-scale public opposition in Honduras.
Seasteading evangelists, in a similar way to Silicon Valley techno solutionists, are presenting the society as a system that can be modified, managed or controlled. A group of entrepreneurs proposes to create new markets and worlds that fit their needs for a rules-free society. But while these initiatives present floating societies as solutions to housing needs, environmental challenges or a way to escape badly governed nations, how can we know for sure that these sea structures are more than tax avoidance bubbles or extravagant retreats for the rich?
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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.
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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.
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Thousands of white threads traverse the length of the building of a now abandoned church hall, the Old Ilgwang Church, close to Icheon Bridge. Once a Methodist prayer center, and briefly a missionary school, only to become again a place for prayer, the building has had many lives and housed different communities, people and stories.
The vacant building is transformed another time with the site responsive installation And to Flounder in this Sea is Sweet to Me. The threads, emitting from a church light source, extend along the whole empty space towards the two windows at the far end wall of the building, and the outdoor terrace. Shono, responds to this space of multilayered narratives with a complex but at the same time delicate, tangible and light structure.
The structure that inhabits the building transforms throughout the day with the changing of the natural light reflecting the passage of the day from light to soft dark.
Playing with concepts of light as a metaphor for vision, this is a call for journeys, travel, introspection, dreams, and wonder. The white threads in horizontal lines - characteristic of Shono’s work - seem to multiply as hand drawn lines, from a single point reaching out to almost hug the windows.
One can step into this form, which purposefully orients the auspice outwards through the windows and towards the direction of the sea. The threads, thin strands of perception, are expanding the artwork's dimensions from the physical to the experiential, inviting us to imagine.
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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
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