
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.
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.VIEW MORE
Calypso36°21 is a women-led, French Moroccan collective that was created in Rabat in 2018 and founded by Zoé Le Voyer, Justine Daquin, Manon Bachelier, and Sanaa Zaghoud. The collective is named after the coordinates of Calypso Deep, 36°34′N 21°8′E, the deepest point of the Mediterranean Sea, which is located in the Hellenic Trench in Greek waters. Now headed by Sanaa Zaghoud and Justine Daquin, the collective has developed a curatorial, transdisciplinary, experimental, and participative approach. An itinerant research program imagined and produced by the collective called Out.of.the.blue. looks at the knowledge production processes that shape the comprehension of (liquid and solid) Mediterranean territories.VIEW MORE
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.VIEW MORE
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.VIEW MORE
There are no boundaries in the sea or land. Fences are human-made structures and boundaries are drawn and constructed by humans. A space surrounded by a fence gives a clear sign to people that it can not be entered, however one’s sight can penetrate a space enclosed with a fence or border. Boundaries can be penetrated from the outside. In Yasuaki Onishi’s installation, the fence that separates this side from the opposite one marks that boundary. Works with fences of different types and sizes create permeable volumes by layering boundaries. Yasuaki uses a ready-made and mundane object such as a fence, sculpting an empty space and allowing it to be filled with our imagination. The space between ourselves and the sea or nature may be thought of as a separation or a border, but here this hollow space is materialized with a structure of vertical and horizontal lines, volumes and voids, allowing us to fill in these forms and create different interpretations or visualize new landscapes. Layer of Boundary explores ideas of emptiness and fullness, absence and presence. Through this installation Yasuaki also explores relationships - and borders - between human and nature. The familiar fence object is reversed; the artist manipulates it so it’s not a fixed structure anymore, but one that can be penetrated and one that can offer different points of view. In a way, what is thought of as a boundary between ourselves and the sea, we are invited to erase with our imagination. Yasuaki invites us to rethink the division between human and sea, human and nature, but also the separation between human activity at land and sea. He reminds us of the need to look at sea, land and humans together and as connected entities in order to be able to address the urgent transformation the sea is undergoing.VIEW MORE
Would you adapt your body to “serve” marine ecosystems and keep aquatic organisms healthy? How to Become Wholesome investigates how bodily waste, in the broadest sense (tears, sweat, and urine), may contribute towards the wellbeing of aquatic organisms. Extending from Kasia’s renowned installation How to Make an Ocean, where the artist collected and analyzed the chemical composition of human tears in order to feed tiny marine ecosystems, this work poses a series of questions such as: How to care for one's own body so that it becomes the most nutritious for a marine ecosystem? What tools are needed to harvest those nutrients from the human body? How do we test harvested substances for their suitability? What are the aesthetics of this process and of developing connections between the human body and the ocean? The ongoing research behind this project is presented in a series of records and tools. Diet diaries and records of the chemical composition of Molga’s bodily secretion (Records of Transforming into Resource); a series of sketches of tools for helping to harvest nourishment from bodily waste (Tools for Harvesting Nourishment); and invented for purpose lab instruments. Most importantly, at the heart of the current edition of this installation, are 3 to 4 interconnected water tanks. In these tanks, water made out of various bodily sources mixes with seawater, influencing the growth and nourishing the development of specially selected aquatic plants. How to Become Wholesome draws a parallel between the wellbeing and survival of the human body with that of non-human species and reminds us that we are very much part of nature and the ocean, not a separate entity.VIEW MORE
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.VIEW MORE
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=302sVIEW MORE
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.VIEW MORE
포레스트 커리큘럼은 남아시아와 동남아시아를 잇는 삼림지대 조미아의 자연문화를 통한 인류세 비평을 주로 연구합니다. 작품 유랑하는 베스티아리는 이 연구의 일환으로, 비인간적 존재들이 근대 국민국가에 내재된 계급적이고 세습적인 폭력과 그에 따른 잔재들에 어떻게 대항해왔는지를 보여주는 작품입니다. 좌중을 압도하는 듯한 거대한 깃발들은 위태롭고도 불안하게 스스로를 지탱하고 있는 듯 보입니다. 깃발에는 벤조인이나 아편부터 동아시아 신화에 등장하는 동물들까지 비인간 존재들을 상징하는 대상들이 그려져 있습니다. 각 깃발들은 비인간적 존재들의 대표자로서 모두가 한데 결합되어 아상블라주 그 자체를 표상합니다. 또한 깃발들과 함께 설치된 사운드 작품은 방콕과 파주에서 채집된 고음역대의 풀벌레 소리, 인도네시아의 경주용 비둘기들의 소리, 지방정부 선거를 앞두고 재정 부패를 유지하기 위한 수단으로 쓰이는 불필요한 공사에서 발생하는 소음, 그리고 위의 소리들을 찾아가는데 사용된 질문들과 조건들을 읽어 내려가는 내레이션으로 이루어져 있습니다.