KOR
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.
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.
VIEW MORE
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.
VIEW MORE
Hypercomf is a multidisciplinary, speculative design artist identity that was first established in Athens in 2017 as a fictitious company profile, but is actually based on the island of Tinos, Greece. Hypercomf’s research subjects often focus on the relationships between nature and culture, domestication and ecosystemic networks, tradition, and technology, as well as challenges faced by small island communities. Their practice fosters interdisciplinary collaborations and community engagement methods of production which often include a range of biodiverse participants. These processes are manifested as space activations, multimedia artworks, and sustainable design prototypes and objects, and are structured around dynamic narratives that feature both organic and inorganic protagonists.
VIEW MORE
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.
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
What would the sea tell us if we could listen to her?
Rumors from the sea(originally produced in Thailand in 2018) is a sound installation in the middle of the bay of Ilgwang Beach. A bamboo-flutes orchestra played by the water is performing unique concerts 24 hours a day, depending on the tide, the direction, tempo and force of the waves. As a potential listener, you are invited to define the beginning and the end of the music piece played for you, to encourage a unique listening experience.
In every coastal zone and culture of the globe the sea has been a means of livelihood, from fishing weirs to contemporary fishing industry, maritime transport or tourism. The ocean is associated both to resource exploitation and a place to find comfort and relief. Within ever changing times, the human relationship to the sea is becoming a challenge in order to preserve our ways of living. In some places, an adaptation strategy for sea-level rise is the construction of flood-barriers as levees, dikes and seawalls.
Rumors from the sea transforms bamboo seawalls from being barriers into a threshold for listening. This temporary sound installation offers a very special place to gather in public open space for contemplating while listening to the sea and to the environment. It creates a space for human dialogue with nature. The extended sounds of the sea invite us to understand listening beyond the sonorous realm, as a practice of taking care, looking after and paying attention to ourselves, our natural surroundings and others.
The sound installation consists of hundreds of bamboo poles with a bamboo flute at their top. At the bottom of the bamboo, a hole lets the water come in and out. Each wave comes inside the tube, pushing the column of air until the flute is played by the sea.
https://felixblume.com/rumorsfromthesea
VIEW MORE
The entire world’s economy rests on the shipping industry. The majority of things that countries produce or use every day – consumer goods, wheat, rice, oil, wood, coal – are moved around the world on cargo ships that grow more and more massive every year. Most of these ships are powered by heavy fuel oil (HFO), a dirty fuel formed from the residual (and therefore cheaper) product left over from petroleum refining. All this HFO leaves its traces across oceans and waterways across the world.
One response to this within the maritime sector is to build ‘greener’ ships that run on ‘greener’ fuels. Over the coming years, Busan’s shipyards will be hard at work building a new fleet of ‘green’ ships that run on alternative fuels such as methanol and hydrogen. Once built, many of these ships will run across what are called ‘green corridors’, bilateral agreements formed between two ports around the world, to plan for the green transition in shipping, secure the supply of ‘green’ fuels and the new infrastructure for refueling ships.
This research film by Liquid Time remotely follows the course of one cargo ship sailing from Rotterdam to Singapore, down one of the world’s largest proposed green corridors. Through a series of conversations held over the course of the 30-day voyage, this work examines the production of the image of the shipping industry’s green future, looking at the legal, economic and infrastructural basis for a green transition that, although promised, remains a distant prospect.
Peeling back the layers of regulation and economic planning that constitute the green corridor, Liquid Time show how the industry response to the climate crisis is not one based on radically altering current markets away from destructive tendencies, but generating new markets within which the same business-as-usual processes that drive the world economy can play out.
VIEW MORE
Echo, Filled in the Sea is an installation in the shape of a net that spans 8 meters in width and 4 meters height. The net is created based on stories of local residents. It is intricately woven with pearls and beads. The round and luminous pearls symbolize precious moments, emotions, and memories. Additionally, the arrangement of pearls, along with elongated beads, form Morse code messages, encoded text characters in sequences of signal durations. Each pulse of the Morse code represents a message written for someone close, who can no longer be here — a message for someone from the past and long gone.
The net is suspended above the beach, swaying freely at the boundary between the sea and the sky. It reaches out toward the distant sea, a symbol of longing, as delicate strands of the net are intertwined like outstretched hands.
The hidden voices within the encrypted messages in the delicate threads of the net yearn to reach the souls of those who are no longer by our side, while reminding us that the sea is a place of hardship and precariousness for many people. As we gaze upon the transparent glow of pearls and beads, we offer a prayer that they might echo back to us.
VIEW MORE
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.'
VIEW MORE
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.
VIEW MORE
