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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.
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.
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Mongjoo Son creates her Swing Pavilion series with broken pieces, fishing nets, and fishing gear floating on the sea. She shows viewers high, wide-ranging installations on an extraordinary scale with a dramatic sense of space. Her work presents a place for rest and play, where people can fully enjoy it through activities.
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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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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.
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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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when water seeps through the grains of sand under your feet is an artwork deriving from the novel, Gaenmaeul by Young-soo Oh. The film, based on the same novel and also titled Gaenmaeul (The Seashore Village in English), was filmed in Ilgwang in 1965.
It is the story of a young woman named “Hae-soon”, who loses her fisherman husband only 10 days after their marriage because of a storm. But, commonly, there are several widows in this village since a lot of fishermen die at sea while they are on fishing trips for a living and to support their families. After her husband dies, a young man named Sangsu becomes Hae-soon’s suitor, and her brother-in-law and mother-in-law, who spot the couple, order them to leave the village before rumors spread out and bring shame to the family. So they leave Gaenmaeul and start working at a quarry but as fate has it, Sangsu also dies from an accident. Eventually, Hae-soon returns to the seaside village and the widows welcome her back. The novel reflects the passive image of women of that time and depicts their tragic lives from a fatalistic point of view.
The artist, inspired by this old novel, started collecting women’s stories in Ilgwang by interviewing women living in the area to capture their memories of Ilgwang as their living place, home, and reality. Dukkyoung Wang debunks gender stereotypes and ideas about the coast and sea as places dominated by men, reminding us that women throughout history have been an inherent and important part of sea histories and livelihoods that depend on the sea.
The glass bottles in the installation contain the women’s stories as messages in bottles floating in the vast sea. These bottles reach one room, a private and innermost place that represents the beach, a place where each body senses and drifts. This is the place covered with sand where Hae-soon lived, the artist lives, and we live together.
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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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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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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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