Sea Art Festival 2023

            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.

Flickering Shores
Sea Imaginaries VIEW MORE

Artist

Ari Bayuaji

                                            Ari Bayuaji was born in Indonesia in 1975 and immigrated to Canada in 2005. Dividing his time between Montreal and Bali, the artist is known mainly for his art installations, which incorporate found and ready-made objects from different parts of the world, thereby exposing himself to the different mechanisms of cultures. In almost all his artworks, Bayuaji has consistently used found/old objects from around the world as the material and subject matter. He is an expert in conveying aspects of daily life, as his works usually try to show the overlooked artistic value in everyday life through objects and places, and their roles within society.

Yang Jazoo

                                            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.

J.R. Carpenter & Tomo Kihara

Dukkyoung Wang

                                            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.

SUPERFLEX

                                            SUPERFLEX was founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen. Conceived as an expanded collective, SUPERFLEX has consistently worked with a wide variety of collaborators, from gardeners to engineers to audience members. Engaging with alternative models for the creation of a social and economic organization, works have taken the form of energy systems, beverages, sculptures, copies, hypnosis sessions, infrastructure, paintings, plant nurseries, contracts, and public spaces. SUPERFLEX has been developing a new kind of urbanism that includes the perspectives of plants and animals, with the ultimate goal of moving society towards interspecies living. For SUPERFLEX, the best ideas might just come from fish.

Artwork

Birds

Merilyn Fairskye

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?

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.

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.

Between Light and Darkness

Cho Eun-Phil

What does a boat represent?

The night is a time when objects that are clearly visible during the day become shrouded in the shell of darkness, connecting through personal imagination. It offers an experience of the unfamiliar, guiding us through vague boundaries with strange and fantastical feelings. Based on these thoughts, Between Light and Darkness intends to explore things that can be sensibly defined in a conventional manner, yet viewed from a different dimension, it aims to reveal them as ambiguous, peculiar or uncanny.

The blue lace used by the artist to cover these boats forms the outer layer of this work, and blue is a color with a heavy presence in this environment between the sea and the sky. But blue also carries the significance of darkness. Darkness, where light is lost, momentarily sets aside the clear existence of familiar objects we know and focuses on landscapes and objects in the dark, opening up a new sense and way of seeing them.

A boat at sea is a common and familiar sight, and an object with a distinct and unique name. In a place like Ilgwang, a boat is a ubiquitous object that we rarely pay attention to. Ilgwang (sunshine in Korean), where this artwork is located, is said to be the place that receives the sunlight first. By enveloping the boat in blue lace during this brief overlap of light and darkness, the boat in the dark temporarily sets aside its clear existence and meaning, becoming a subject that invites us to imagine alternative meanings. While the lace surrounds the entire form of the boat, it simultaneously reveals parts of it hidden beneath the patterned fabric. Like skin, the lace covers the object, making it opaque but also accentuating the subtleties of it hidden underneath.

Seen yet unseen, an everyday object becomes open to new interpretations and stories. Is this the representation of a journey or a passage? A journey at its beginning or the end?

Floating Fragments

Seema Nusrat

                                        What is the impact of our accelerated urban and suburban development on the environment, nature and heritage? How much more can urban development expand into natural habitats without disturbing the equilibrium?

Today, the world’s population is three times larger than in the mid-twentieth century, and in November 2022, the globe’s population reached 8 billion people. With increasing numbers of people also comes an inevitable growth and growing demand for urban development, and while cities become densely populated, they expand into rural peripheries.

Floating Fragments serves as a commentary on the swift and uncontrolled growth of urban development. With an increasing demand for space to accommodate a fast-growing population, the expansion of cities has not only disturbed the delicate equilibrium of natural habitats but it has also obscured our cultural heritage.

The artwork draws inspiration from local architecture, and in particular traditional roof tiles, presenting us with a partially submerged roof over water, and creating an unsettling perspective. This prompts us to reflect on the current trajectory we are navigating, highlighting the discord between urban development and the preservation of nature and heritage.

The artwork also calls attention to the risk of flooding, the impact of which is being felt in many areas and communities across the world, and is likely being exacerbated by climate change. As we continue to warm the planet with greenhouse gas emissions, and water warms and expands, and as sea levels rise, the frequency and intensity of extreme flood events,

Muddy-Water

Lab C

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.'

Deep Sea Meditation

Yun Pil Nam

                                        The sea has many faces. Sometimes, it comes to us with a calm smile, sometimes with a storm as if it were angry. Today, people have led an affluent life with the diversity that the sea gives humans. At the same time, people wonder whether they can pass on the earth's ocean to future generations in its entirety.

This installation expresses the symbiotic relationship between people, marine environments and the sea, which is still a base of infinite life that can be restored. In the ocean, the deep sea has a deep interior. Attention moves quietly and slowly, not being swayed by the changes and waves of the busy world. Deep Sea Meditation the feeling of walking along the path of the deep sea, a realm where you can enjoy quiet and deep contemplation away from the hustle and bustle of urban modern life. It also intends a time to look back on the relationship with the sea in the past, and consider a future where our connection with the deep sea hopefully wouldn't be one of exploitation.