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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.
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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Yasuaki Onishi has exhibited throughout Japan and internationally. His most recent solo exhibition in Japan was in 2022 at the Creative Center Osaka, but he has also participated in Framing the Boundaries at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Negative Space at the ZKM Karlsruhe, and THE MOON at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. In 2010, Onishi was the recipient of a United States-Japan Foundation Fellowship that included a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, as well as a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Inc., New York.
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Renata Padovan creates poetic channels of communication, spotlighting issues related to land occupation and their ecological, political, social, and cultural consequences. Recently, the majority of her work has been based on research pertaining to the devastation of ecosystems. Since 2012, she has developed several projects in the Amazon, with a focus on deforestation, river pollution, and the destructive effects of hydroelectric power plants. Padovan has participated in several AIR programs and since 2023 she has taken part in the Tara Ocean Europe expedition together with scientists, exploring and analyzing the surface of the ocean. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, institutions, and museums in Brazil and other countries around the world.
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Robertina Šebjanič is an internationally exhibited artist/researcher whose work explores the bio-chemical, (geo)political, and cultural realities of aquatic environments and the impact of humanity on other organisms. Her projects call for developing empathetic strategies aimed at recognizing the Other. In her analysis of the Anthropocene and its theoretical framework, the artist uses the terms “aquatocene” and “aquaforming” to refer to the human impact on aquatic environments. Her works have received awards and nominations at the Prix Ars Electronica, Starts Prize, Falling Walls, and RE:Humanism.
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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.
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Finally, I breathe deeply facing Ilgwang Beach. This is a moment when you encounter a space that invites you to relax and let go, forgetting about tension and time.
Mongjoo Son’s Ilgwang Swing is such a space; a swing pavilion made of objects found in Busan and Ilgwang that invites visitors to interact with it and feel liberated. The artist, having collected objects that usually float on the sea, has stacked them together to create the swing pavilion structure, which is made to look like it’s breathing, inhaling, and exhaling. She portrays the constant movement of the buoy as the movement of a swing. And she invites visitors to move along with this breathing, inhaling and exhaling as they use the swing.
Mongjoo Son creates this swing for adults in particular (although children are also welcome to use it), as adulthood often means the end of play that brings joy, stimulates our imagination, and helps us adapt and solve problems. Play can also connect us to others, and Mongjoo Son’s swing here enables us to take our feet off the ground and reality for a while to feel like floating, and move along with the sea.
Mongjoo Son’s large-scale and dramatic structures offer a reimagining of fluidity while enabling us to imagine new stories around a place. Ilgwang Swing becomes such a space inviting us to connect with and reimagine stories about the sea.
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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.
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The ocean is the origin of uncertainty and the beginning of navigation, an opening of the world where dreams of submission and domination meet. According to French philosopher, theorist and writer Michel Serres, it is the origin of noise.
Part cosmic weather report, part geo-strategic briefing, part romantic novella, Ocean Briefings is a series of daily transmissions taking place over the course of the Sea Art Festival. Telling tales of logistical breakdown, geopolitical scrambling, meteorological anxiety and erotic intrigue, it takes inspiration from the instability of a world in the making. For the duration of the festival, it functions as a “subtitle” to Ilgwang Beach, framing the sea in search for signals in an ocean of noise.
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Lab C explore locations in different regions, and in nature to discover nuanced stories. They led a workshop with children for Sea Art Festival 2023 to explore forgotten spaces around Ilgwang, especially the Ilgwang Stream which is a brackish water zone. The results and videos of the workshop are presented in this exhibition allowing us to contemplate the importance of our relationship with nature.
Muddy water has a blurry meaning, as it can be a mixture of dirt and water. “Blurry” is an interesting term for the artists here, as it indicates a changing state, for example a variable status between “clean (or flowing, running) water” and “dirty (or stagnant, messy) mud.”
In Korean, as in other languages, the phrase “muddy water” is used frequently and commonly in a negative way. And similarly, the expression “mud fight”, which figuratively indicates a dirty fight. This ambivalence between “positive” and “negative”, or “water” and “dirt”, while confusing, it can be fascinating. Like the randomness of chaos that can have varied potential.
Ilgwang Stream, which meets Icheon Port on the left side of Ilgwang Beach, flows into the sea by combining 10 tributaries, including Dalum Mountain Valley, Hambaek Mountain Valley, Nine Mountain, and Ilgwang Mountain Valley, which are the origins. And when the tide progresses, the seawater flows back into the Ilgwang Stream. Ilgwang Stream, where seawater and freshwater meet, is a brackish water area and a wetland. According to a survey by the Busan Research Institute in 2001, a total of 395 species were observed in the area, and in 2005, salmon, which was released into the wild from Gijang, returned in the stream. In 2021, with the creation of Ilgwang Icheon Ecological Park and the surrounding trail project underway, rapid changes are expected to occur in the ecological environment of Ilgwang Stream.
Lab C’s research shows evidence of fish diversity in the stream. In addition to the four-white fish of Ilgwang Stream, sweetfish, mullet, perch, blowfish, salmon, and eel, which are conciliatory fish, and even the brackish brown goth, which is second class endangered shellfish.
If one walks up along Ilgwang Stream, they will see the river maintenance work still in full swing. The spatial transformation of brackish water and wetlands continues. When management and control systems began to intervene, the flow of water that naturally flowed into the sea is changing. And obviously, changes are also occurring in various life forms that rely on wetlands and brackish water areas. Could this human intervention here be considered a recovery or another destruction? It is at this point that the artists are interested in questions about the presence of Ilgwang Stream through the concept of 'muddy water.'
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