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.
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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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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Rebecca Moss’s artistic practice explores notions of absurdity, precarity, and instability, and takes a variety of forms across different media. She is drawn to slapstick for its sense of reciprocity inasmuch as our surroundings can act back upon us because we are not always in control. She is inspired by slapstick performances and creates scenarios that stage interactions between human gestures and elemental forces, where an idea or gesture is humorously played out to the point of futility, chaos, or crisis.
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Merilyn Fairskye lives in Sydney, Australia whose recent video and photographic work explores the effects of powerful events of real life on humans and the environment. Current projects that explore the relationships between technology, atomic landscapes, and community have taken her on location to the Polygon in Kazakhstan, Sellafield, Chernobyl, and other key nuclear sites. Her work has been presented at over 180 exhibitions and festivals, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
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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 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.
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Finally, I breathe deeply facing Ilgwang Beach. This is a moment when you encounter a space that invites you to relax and let go, forgetting about tension and time.
Mongjoo Son’s Ilgwang Swing is such a space; a swing pavilion made of objects found in Busan and Ilgwang that invites visitors to interact with it and feel liberated. The artist, having collected objects that usually float on the sea, has stacked them together to create the swing pavilion structure, which is made to look like it’s breathing, inhaling, and exhaling. She portrays the constant movement of the buoy as the movement of a swing. And she invites visitors to move along with this breathing, inhaling and exhaling as they use the swing.
Mongjoo Son creates this swing for adults in particular (although children are also welcome to use it), as adulthood often means the end of play that brings joy, stimulates our imagination, and helps us adapt and solve problems. Play can also connect us to others, and Mongjoo Son’s swing here enables us to take our feet off the ground and reality for a while to feel like floating, and move along with the sea.
Mongjoo Son’s large-scale and dramatic structures offer a reimagining of fluidity while enabling us to imagine new stories around a place. Ilgwang Swing becomes such a space inviting us to connect with and reimagine stories about the sea.
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Robertina Šebjanič’s immersive sonic installations and environments often create spaces where human and nature or human and non-human creatures meet, exploring their relationships and interconnected worlds, but also tensions between these ecologies.
Tidal Whispers: Busan's Oceanic Tales is a new immersive sound installation created specifically for the Sea Art Festival, and bringing together underwater sounds and sounds from marine life collected by the Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology (KIOST), alongside human voices and song.
By engaging in a cross-empathic sympathy exploration of concepts and analytical methods from the marine world, Tidal Whispers: Busan's Oceanic Tales delves into more-than-human oceanic ecologies, geographies, and cultures as an entangled web of interdependencies in planetary watery imaginaries.
Interdisciplinary and poetic, the work serves as an activation of empathic sympathy towards oceanic creatures that reside beneath the waves and express their messages through the poetry of Their songs while reflecting deeply on our actions and their direct impact on the seas and oceans. Robertina’s work, exploring animal-human and interspecies communication through interdisciplinary research and art-science exchange, addresses ecological consequences and underwater noise pollution in oceans and seas across the world.
Tidal Whispers: Busan's Oceanic Tales weaves together aquatic and human stories, sciences and mythologies presenting and celebrating the resilience of marine species, while opening up a world view, where all creatures and living entities have a shared experience and are deeply connected, no matter how small or large, visible or invisible they are.
Credits
Artist: Robertina Šebjanič
Text, music, textile, audio: Robertina Šebjanič (SIovenia)
Narrators, voice: Polona Torkar (Slovenia) and Pilljae Kim (Slovenia / South Korea)
Recording of voice and mastering: Rok Kovatch (Slovenia)
Field recordings: KIOST | Korea Institute of Ocean Science and Technology
Architecture support of the installation: studioentropia
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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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