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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.
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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Kim Doki is deeply interested in the various layers of the world in which we live and the universe as a whole, including nature and life, society and culture, matter and energy, and time and space. Kim uses immaterial media such as light, heat, gravity, and language to create works that depict phenomena that interact with matter. By continually asking questions about what we are and how we exist, Kim’s works are at times as scientific as they are philosophical, while at other times being equally poetic and shamanic.
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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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Dukkyoung Wang takes note of the subtle and captures the indifferent. Wang tries especially hard to reveal the hidden side of those who are pushed to the periphery of society—those who are invisible and voiceless—by using various materials and media. In recent years, Wang has been trying to “speak to (someone)” and “capture (something)” by confronting the stories of women and considering the form of language that sutures the gaps between the inner and exterior sides of an individual.
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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
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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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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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Jane Jin Kaisen, Of The Sea, 2013, Single channel video, color, sound, 2min. 15sec.
In Of the Sea, the artist is seen walking along the black lava rock shore of Jeju Island where her mother and grandmother used to earn a living as haenyeo, women sea diver. She is carrying discarded items used for diving as well as the book Annals of the Jeju Haenyeo’s Anti-Japanese Resistance written by her grandfather while he served as Head of the Commemoration Committee for the Jeju Haenyeo’s Anti-Colonial Resistance Movement. The book was published in 1995 on occasion of the First Memorial Ceremony for the Jeju Haenyeo Anti-colonial Resistance, a movement that erupted in 1931-1932 when the haenyeo started marching in protest against the Japanese colonial forces along the same coast where the artist is seen walking almost eight decades later.
The video is juxtaposed with the song Song of the Haenyeo, the notes of which are printed on the first pages of the artist’s grandfather’s book. The song is composed around a Japanese melody, but the lyrics are altered and are written by Gwan-soon Gang, a social activist and leader of the resistance movement, while he was imprisoned. The song, although it was banned, was sung by haenyeo and attests to the gendered dimensions of Jeju haenyeo culture, the harsh and dangerous vocation of diving, and their reliance on the sea for survival.
While the careful treatment of the book and the diving tools allude to an attempt at preserving history and bridging the gaps in time and the transmission of intergenerational knowledge, the video ends before the artist reaches the sea. Walking with unsteady awkward movements and dressed in clothing and boots unfit for the environment, there is a sense of discontinuity and rupture, which stands in contrast to the lyrics of the song. In recent decades, haenyeo diving culture has drastically diminished due to modernization, societal changes, industrial farming and destruction of the oceanic environment. With it, the knowledge of the sea and diving, along with the matriarchal cosmology of Jeju and shamanic spiritual culture connected to the sea, is no longer being seamlessly passed on from mother to daughter.
Gilles Aubry, Atlantic Ragagar, 2022, Single channel video, color, sound, 31min. 43sec.
Shot in collaboration with biologist Younes Boundir, Atlantic Ragagar is an experimental film on seaweed and pollution on the Moroccan Atlantic coast. With its clear water, the Sidi Bouzid beach hosts dozens of seaweed species. Further south in Safi, marine biodiversity suffers from pollution caused by industrial phosphate plants. The film is an attempt to listen to coastal life, inviting the spectator into a process of ecological transformation. If pollution often remains hidden in the landscape, the effects of toxicity are rendered through the voice and bodily presence of the main character performed by Imane Zoubai. As she hums, sings, breathes, and silently interacts with algae, a new figure progressively emerges, “maouj”, an aquatic body open to transcorporeal and interspecies speculations.
Calypso36°21 & Derya Akkaynak, Untitled, 2021, Single channel video, text, sound, 9min. 4sec. Supported by Sea Art Festival 2023.
The sound piece Untitled (titled by Calypso36°21) was created by oceanographer Derya Akkaynak to explain to a large audience her discovery ‘Sea-Thru’. She records herself on her phone. Instead of narrating and explaining Sea-Thru in a scientific way, ‘objective’ and cold, Derya talks about the loss of her mother, her relationship to the sea and how those elements helped her make a huge breakthrough for the ocean. Derya gifted this piece to Justine Daquin in 2021 after a discussion they had together that was part of a larger project of interviews with female ocean scientists. They all approach their discipline with intuition and emotion and thanks to this way of practicing science, made major discoveries and helped heal and care for the ocean.
Jane Jin Kaisen(born 1980 in Jeju Island, lives in Copenhagen) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Spanning the mediums of video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research and engagement with diverse communities. Through multi-year projects and collaborations, she has engaged topics such as transnational adoption, the Korean War and division, the Jeju April Third Massacre, and Cold War legacies. Another recurring focus revolves around nature and island spaces, cosmologies, feminist re-framings of myths, and engagement with ritual and spiritual practices. Her works negotiate and mediate the means of representation, resistance, and recognition, thus contouring alternative genealogies and sites of collective emergence.
Kaisen is a recipient of the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023) and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022). She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) alongside artists Hwayeon Nam and siren eun young jeong in the exhibition History Has Failed Us, but No Matter curated by Hyunjin Kim. She was awarded “Exhibition of the Year 2020” by AICA - International Association of Art Critics, Denmark for the exhibition Community of Parting at Kunsthal Charlottenborg. Kaisen has participated in the biennials of Liverpool, Gwangju, Anren, Jeju, among others, and she had numerous solo exhibitions including recently Jane Jin Kaisen: Braiding and Mending at The Image Centre (2023), Of Specters or Returns at Le Bicolore (2023), Currents at Fotografisk Center (2023), Parallax Conjunctures at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2021), and screenings Dislocation Blues: Jane Jin Kaisen, Tate Modern (2023), Ceremony (Burial of an Undead World), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022) to name a few.
She holds a PhD in artistic research from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA in Art Theory and Media Art from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and she participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Gilles Aubry is a Swiss artist, musician and researcher based in Berlin. His work explores sound and listening as embodied, technological, and ecological practice. His installations, films, performances and radio plays are presented internationally in art institutions, film festivals and music venues. Recent projects include The Gramophone Effect, a sound piece with Robert Millis and the Indian collective Traveling Archive, commissioned by Documenta14 (2017, Kassel and Athens); Black Anthenna, a performance with Nathalie Mba Bikoro for the Tuned Cities Festival (2018, Ancient Messene); Salam Godzilla, a film essay shot in Agadir on the 1960 earthquake (2019, FID Marseille), and The Whistle, a sound installation by the VACUT Group (Voices Against Corruption and Ugly Trading), commissioned by OTO Sound Museum in Zurich (2022).
Derya Akkaynak is a Turkish engineer and oceanographer whose research focuses on imaging and vision underwater. She has professional, technical, and scientific diving certifications and conducted fieldwork from the Bering Sea to Antarctica. Akkaynak was a finalist for the 2019 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists for resolving a fundamental problem in underwater computer vision—the reconstruction of lost colors and contrast which led to the development of the Sea-thru algorithm.
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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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