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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.
By combining an intriguing palette and concepts that profoundly transform public spaces, Jazoo Yang, based in Berlin, questions the relationship between ourselves and the spaces we inhabit. In addition, she considers how our original senses are being altered amidst the rapid transformation of our cities. From the materials that make up our cities to the nature that inhabits them alongside us, Yang is expanding her artistic realm as she works experimentally across various genres, including painting, installation, live painting, and public art.
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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.
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Based in Karachi, Pakistan, Seema Nusrat finds her creative muse in the bustling energy of her urban metropolis. With a deep-rooted fascination for urban life and the interaction between existing and imposed urban landscapes, she seeks to understand the complex relationship between people and the environment around them. Nusrat embraces a collaborative work method involving artisans and technical experts from diverse backgrounds, enhancing the depth and richness of her artwork and imbuing it with layers of cultural significance and craftsmanship. Nusrat’s work invites contemplation, urging audiences to question the underlying essence of their urban surroundings and the lives pulsating within them.
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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.
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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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How are marine environments connected with our urban homes and traditions?
Fish kissed is a short film that explores the often distant, but intimate relationship between the urban human home and the ocean. The narrative is taking place entirely over a kitchen sink, featuring a traditional island song by the renowned Domna Samiou choir in Greece.
The film presents two main characters, a woman and a sea urchin, whose relationship seems to be based on a parallel co-domestication process. Fish kissed examines both the physical connection between human spaces and marine ecosystems and their cultural connection, for example through references of food preparation, traditional song, eco-news and climate worries, or the practice of ichthyomancy (a divination by means of the heads or the entrails of fishes) and biopsy, to foresee the future. The film examines the juxtaposed perception of the sea as a “trophos” - a pleasure, resource and nutrition provider - and waste ground, the cultural stylization of the marine ecosystem mostly by the tourism and energy sectors, and the future of the oceans.
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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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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.
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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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What if we were able to transform immense quantities of plastic objects found on our shores into valuable material?
Traces of the Waves is a new art installation, which forms part of the artist’s ongoing Weaving the Ocean art project series. In this project series, artist Ari Bayuaji transforms plastic waste into textile art, often made in collaboration with artisans.
The site-specific installation, created for this year’s Sea Art Festival, and situated alongside the wooden pathway next to Ilgwang Beach, has been constructed using thousands of plastic threads unraveled from plastic ropes found on beaches and the coast in Bali (Indonesia), as well as found plastic objects gathered from shorelines in Busan (South Korea).
Colorful plastic ropes, which are used for fishing nets, are often found washed up on our coastlines across the world in large quantities. Many times, they are entangled with marine life such as corals, or wrapped around vegetation on the beaches and beyond. But apart from plastic ropes, every year, we produce and consume over 400 million tons of plastic. From these plastic objects, we consume and throw away, about at least 14 million tons end up in the ocean every year, being carried away across the waters. Many of these plastic objects end up along our shorelines and plastic makes up almost 80% of all marine debris, from sea surface waters to deep-sea sediments.
Traces of the Waves addresses pressing environmental and social issues such as the immense pollution of our oceans and its consequences, the destruction of marine life, and the loss of the coastlines’ natural beauty. Bayuaji - working in collaboration with communities and artisans - goes through a meticulous process of collecting little by little plastic ropes and other plastic objects found on the beach, washing these materials several times, and separating them until they are transformed into usable fine threads that can be woven into textiles or used in his art installations such as this one.
This long process becomes a collaborative, caring and conciliatory effort that transforms an insignificant and cheap plastic object that pollutes our waters, giving it a new life as a useful and valuable artistic material. A devastating and negative impact on the environment becomes a “positive” outcome, drawing on collectivity and common endeavor, while celebrating craftsmanship. At the same time, Bayuaji pays homage to his Indonesian culture and textile traditions, but also the importance and role of the sea, which is right to the center of Balinese culture, philosophy, spirituality and rituals.
As one walks through the Traces of the Waves path, colorful strands and tufts of plastic threads can evoke forms of marine creatures like jellyfish and corals or the feel of seaweed strands and sea grasses moving in the waters.
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