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.
Lab C works with the keywords “plant,” “region,” and “art.” Lab C, a collaborative duo made up of Mira Park (Forest Curator) and Changpa (Art Director), studies the experience they had in one particular place in the past after carefully observing one single part of Busan’s mountains and surrounding sea over a long period of time. They have presented curatorial programs such as Time to Ramble, Time to Ramble: The Sea, and Cosmos in One Square Meter by curating viewers’ experiences.
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Kasia Molga not only exposes the stories hiding in the intersections of art and science but also explores how we can tell these stories through collaboration with more-than-human fellow “earthlings.” Her gravitation towards navigating our changing relationship with the natural world was born on the open sea, where she spent her childhood growing up onboard merchant navy vessels with her father. Her internationally acclaimed work How To Make An Ocean explored how tears could be used to create marine ecosystems. This led to further investigating how other bodily resources can be used to support life in her work How To Become Wholesome.
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Gary Zhexi Zhang explores connections between cosmology, technology, and the economy. He is the editor of Catastrophe Time!, a book of financial fiction. Dead Cat Bounce, an oratorio he made with Waste Paper Opera, premiered in 2022. His last solo show, Cycle 25, documented events at the boundaries between speculative belief and the material world, like natural disasters, scam nations, and cosmic economies. His work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennial, the Power Station of Art, Shanghai, and Para Site, Hong Kong. Upcoming commissions will be presented at the Art Gallery of York University, EPFL, Lausanne, and Eastside Projects, Birmingham.
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Just over 40 years ago, most houses in Korea were earthen houses. Before the Saemaul Movement - the political initiative launched in the 1970s to modernize the rural South Korean economy - demolished all the houses, the walls and ceilings of both tiled and thatched houses were all finished with soil mixed with rice straw and reeds. In these houses people communicated between the thin layers made of window paper, which functioned like windows today. In any country, town or city, traditional houses are constructed using materials easily found within their local surroundings. In Korea, such materials were soil, wood, stone, and rice straw.
Jazoo Yang has been interested in traditional Korean hanok and thatched houses and has been researching archives and other relevant sources about the rapidly disappearing earthen houses. During her research, she found out that there had been a type of dwelling in Busan using seaweed as a construction material. Many refugees, who moved to Busan during the Korean War in the 1950s, had to build temporary and quick shelters using materials that they could easily find within their local proximity. Therefore, during the war, instead of rice straw, one of the ingredients of traditional earthen houses, they mixed seaweed, the material easiest to obtain on the beach, with soil to build a house.
The artist, as part of an ongoing research, has been exploring the earthen houses made of seaweed remnants of which can be found in seaside refugee villages, including Yeongdo, Busan, in order to examine and understand the architectural and construction techniques of refugees, especially the methods of using seaweed and soil as building materials.
In her installation for the Sea Art Festival 2023, Bricks from the Sea, as in other of her artworks, Jazoo Yang incorporates these methods of using soil and seaweed into the construction of her work itself, bringing back to life a now-forgotten, but ingenious and creative frugal innovation.
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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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Have you ever looked closely at a grain of sand? Imagined it as a small part of the world, with its very own story to tell?
The journey of a grain of sand has been guided by water, wind, and ice over time. Just like people, each grain has its own character and tells a unique story of the land and history. It is also one of the most important materials in our lives. Without it, we would have no glass, no computer chips, and no buildings.
To See a World in a Grain of Sand is a project that maps the Earth through small sand samples contributed by people worldwide, revealing hidden narratives embedded in glass fused from 'wild' sands. From a hot and dry desert to a cold and snowy mountain; a skyscraper in a bustling city to an archaeological ruin; an invisible political border to a vast and open landscape; an excavated gold mine to the bottom of an ancient seabed; or a place of civil unrest to a serene holiday island. When these geographical diversities become visible, it becomes clear that sand carries not only ecological significance but powerful social and political histories.
Specially curated for the Sea Art Festival, Atelier NL delves into South Korea's history. In the intricate tapestry of our planet's story, sand stands as a silent witness to the passage of time, shaped over billions of years. Yet, this seemingly abundant resource faces an urgent global crisis - a scarcity driven by insatiable demand.
Every year, we remove billions of tons of sand from beaches, rivers, oceans, and quarries across the planet, locking it away in infrastructure and technology. This makes sand one of the most quickly disappearing natural resources in the world, so much that there is now a global sand scarcity.
Amidst these global challenges, South Korea stands at a crossroads. As a rapidly growing nation, it must strike a delicate balance between ambitious development plans and safeguarding the environment. Busan's skyline of towering skyscrapers showcases the magnitude of sand's role in construction. It serves as a poignant reminder that sustainable sand management is crucial to support the city's growth while preserving the natural beauty that surrounds it. This installation invites you to see the world anew, where the humble grain of sand carries stories of our past, present, and future.
The collected sands, mainly gathered by Bora Hong, a multidisciplinary designer from Seoul now residing in Chiang Mai, are visualized on the map of South Korea. During her 10-day road trip, she collected sands from diverse beaches along the coastline. Exploring rivers and little streams led her to unexpectedly beautiful and tranquil locations. Bora's involvement with "aworldofsand.com" allowed her to uncover sands with profound stories and memories reflecting the country's rich cultural heritage and natural beauty.
Alongside Bora's captivating journey, Atelier NL categorized each story and place into six themes: history, migration, meaning, ecology, delay, and scarcity, providing a unique perspective on the sands' significance and the memories they evoke.
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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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Famously, there are no scientific parameters to explain what consciousness is, or how it emerged: this is known as “the hard problem of consciousness.” But maybe this problem is only hard from humans’ point of view. All Is Water turns the tables and reflects on this problem from the perspective of non-human consciousness. Featuring a speculative text spoken and written by a computer, the film moves from meditations on the history and limits of science to an almost mystical exploration of fish consciousness.
All Is Water filmed in Corsica during the spawning period of the Chromis Chromis - a small species of ray-finned fish from the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean - when the scientists Anja Wegner and Alex Jordan set up an experiment to determine how architecture affects the social behavior of the fish. SUPERFLEX supplied three buoyant structures designed to appeal to underwater life. The local Chromis Chromis population congregated around these structures in great numbers in order to spawn.
As the film goes on, the narration expands its scope from this specific experiment to ask which methods—beyond the materialism of Western science—might be useful for reimagining the hard problem of consciousness. Combining scientific speculation, architectural futurism, and AI-generated philosophy, All Is Water suggests that consciousness is not a stable category, and that humans can potentially shift their perspective in order to tune in to the needs, preferences, and spiritual life of other species.
All is Water is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.
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