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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.
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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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?
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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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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What does a boat represent?
The night is a time when objects that are clearly visible during the day become shrouded in the shell of darkness, connecting through personal imagination. It offers an experience of the unfamiliar, guiding us through vague boundaries with strange and fantastical feelings. Based on these thoughts, Between Light and Darkness intends to explore things that can be sensibly defined in a conventional manner, yet viewed from a different dimension, it aims to reveal them as ambiguous, peculiar or uncanny.
The blue lace used by the artist to cover these boats forms the outer layer of this work, and blue is a color with a heavy presence in this environment between the sea and the sky. But blue also carries the significance of darkness. Darkness, where light is lost, momentarily sets aside the clear existence of familiar objects we know and focuses on landscapes and objects in the dark, opening up a new sense and way of seeing them.
A boat at sea is a common and familiar sight, and an object with a distinct and unique name. In a place like Ilgwang, a boat is a ubiquitous object that we rarely pay attention to. Ilgwang (sunshine in Korean), where this artwork is located, is said to be the place that receives the sunlight first. By enveloping the boat in blue lace during this brief overlap of light and darkness, the boat in the dark temporarily sets aside its clear existence and meaning, becoming a subject that invites us to imagine alternative meanings. While the lace surrounds the entire form of the boat, it simultaneously reveals parts of it hidden beneath the patterned fabric. Like skin, the lace covers the object, making it opaque but also accentuating the subtleties of it hidden underneath.
Seen yet unseen, an everyday object becomes open to new interpretations and stories. Is this the representation of a journey or a passage? A journey at its beginning or the end?
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With philosophy at its core, Shailesh’s work contemplates the world at large by examining existing knowledge, systems, traditions, rituals, metaphysics, and philosophy itself through methods of science, technology, and artistic intervention. With a diverse visual vocabulary, he attempts to interweave philosophical connections between disparate observations, thoughts, moods, feelings – the internal world – and objects, machines, landscapes, phenomenons – the outer world.
As part of his learning in a Gurukul (Traditional Indian knowledge system or school), he was exposed to mythological scriptures and Tarka Shastra - a process to analyze the source of knowledge and its verification through the art of debate. The play between the external beauty or functionality of a form/object, its inner meaning, extended connotations, and the consequential critical analysis of the object is what is embodied in the Tarka Shastra which also informs his artistic practice. He thereby combines this knowledge with scientific methods and machinery of the modern world that concerns contemporary human needs, roles, and responsibilities.
Samudra Manthan addresses the same by navigating, visualizing, and creating a kinetic sculpture of a rotating mountain that constantly churns the seawater contained in a tank. By taking reference from an Indian mythological story of the same name, the work mentions a churning process through which the world and all the living beings emerged, but also emerged nectar and poison. The story begins with the Devas (deities) forming an alliance with the Asuras (demons) to jointly churn the ocean for the nectar of immortality to be shared, assuring diplomacy and equality. The churning of the ocean was an elaborate process for which Mount Mandara (Name of a mountain) was used as a churning rod, and Vasuki the King of Serpents became the churning rope. As the process is gone through and the nectar is successfully obtained, it is deceptively consumed by the devas / deities whereas the poison is left for the demons.
This mythological tale of aspirations is visualized in the context of today’s world in the kinetic project, Samudra Manthan: Churning of the Ocean. Although the nectar is desired by all, the poison shall inevitably be consumed too. The yearning to achieve immortality in the story is also symbolic and metaphorically profound in relation to contemporary issues.
The vastness of the ocean and its unlimited potential has been a reservoir of resources for humankind since ages. In current times, it is considered one of the most valuable natural resources that provide us with; food, fuel, energy, medicine, minerals, gems, and other materials. This extraction process often includes drilling the seabed in order to extract the crude oil, reverberating the core of the mythological story. Here in the project, the nectar and poison are metaphorically perceived as consequences of our constant efforts in the consumption industry. Samudra Manthan: Churning of the Ocean is an attempt to examine the polarizing impacts of extraction of resources by contemplating the construction, deconstruction, and consumption of resources and thoughts in current times. In this process, Shailesh uses technology to reflect upon his thoughts and give them a new meaning that eventually unfolds the socio-political hierarchy.
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