The Sea Around Us - Online Catalogue

The Sea Around Us
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The Sea Around Us
John Akomfrah (GH/GB), Forensic Oceanography and
Forensic Architecture (GB), Shaun Gladwell (AU), Karen
Power (IE), Susanne M. Winterling (DE).
Curated by Emer McGarry
The Model;
home of The Niland Collection
29 Feb. – 31 May 2020
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Contents
The Sea Around Us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page | 4
Rosie O’ Reilly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page | 8
John Akomfrah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page | 16
Forensic Oceanography and Forensic Architecture . . . . . Page | 32
Shaun Gladwell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page | 48
Karen Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page | 56
Susanne M. Winterling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page | 66
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The Sea Around Us
The sea offers us the idea of the infinite, the unknowable. A huge
expanse that invites us to wonder about the limits of our world and
reality. The sea has been a source of inspiration to artists, thinkers
and writers for hundreds of years – its sometime serenity juxtaposed
with its sublime terrifying power. The sea’s seemingly inexhaustible
abundance and the promise of what lies beyond, have invited humankind
to strike out in exploration in an effort to understand its vastlessness,
and to enrich themselves with the knowledge, sustenance and treasure
they find out there.
The sheer immensity of the sea, means it cannot be seen as a clear-cut
theme or topic that can be easily explained or understood. It has many
aspects, and our relationship with it is complex and contradictory. The
sea is a channel that enables communication and trade, and that casts
knowledge and ideas up on many distant shores. While the sea is a
source of life and abundance, it is also a graveyard, not only for ancient
civilizations, but for the many who bravely risk its depths in search of
peace today. Life within the sea, which once seemed so limitless, has
fallen victim to the actions of the Anthropocene age, and the effects of
this are becoming more scientifically clear all the time.
The works in this exhibition invite the viewer to consider the sea as
a setting where a multiplicity of mostly unseen and unknown dramas
are played out, dramas that are at times non-human and at times
inhumane. Through these visual and sound-based works, we invite you
to contemplate the ebb and flow of the ocean, and humankind’s
multi-faceted relationship with it.
The show is accompanied by a new music performance and sound
installation by composer and sound artist Karen Power, and a specially
commissioned essay by artist Rosie O’Reilly (IE).
Emer McGarry, 2020
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IT DAZZLES ME SLOWLY
by Rosie O’Reilly
Slipping under the surface of the sea I enter an otherworldly
sensorium. Muffled sounds draw my body under, I’m teased
with a feeling of weightlessness and an ability to shapeshift not
always possible on land. I hold my breadth and wonder what it
is that makes this place feel so like home.
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Asking this question sends me into a speculative
spin where we journey to understand the world
through many different lenses, axes and planes.
The boundless possibility of the ocean opens up
an aquatic world of symbolic meaning that I want
to unknot again and again and again. In this place
I am all sensory. This under water place reaches
out and in. Tilting my head, the tidal ripples
lay a hazy path in the sand in front of me. I’m
reminded that these are the tidal patterns that
dictate our terrestrial lives. The resonances of
these currents are felt everywhere and it seems
vital to tell the entwined stories of this place. No
one knew this more it seems than Jack B. Yeats
whose abstract brush stokes seem to dance across
different aquatic planes and whose oily figures
shift between the land and sea of his boyhood
town of Sligo. This ability to envisage a new world
through mark and gesture, welcomed strangers
to the west coast of Ireland. Perhaps it is this
ability to view the world through other lenses that
makes art essential now. Never has it been more
important to imagine new worlds, to welcome
strangers and make work that does not stay still
- that comes to meet you in its story telling. Art
then plays a crucial role in helping us ‘stay in the
trouble’ as the cultural theorist and philosopher
Donna Haraway tells us. 1
And these are troubled and stirred up times.
Looking below the surface to investigate led me
to an invasive algae, Undaria pinnatifidais, which
I began tracking in Porto in 2017. I find it today in
Kilmore Quay, Waterford, and in Dún Laoghaire
harbour. 2 Originally from Japan, it is migrating
slowly around the coast of Ireland; hitchhiking
on our leisure vessels and being welcomed by
the warming waters of this new world. While
its population expands and proliferates in local
waters, we watch as the sixth greatest species
extinction gets closer. In Dublin Port gallons
of ballast water from container ships empty
thousands of its spores among other species into
the water, while in the belly of the vessels climatedisplaced
humans risk their lives in refrigerated
units. Coastal areas have always been collision
points for these entwined human and non-human
stories and now, in order to understand these
strange and difficult times, we must unknot them
as they wash up together on sandy shores.
I am drawn down; resisting the urge to breathe I
dive deeper. Again I hear Haraway ‘... it matters
what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it
matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts
think thoughts’. 3 What stories can this aquatic
space reframe if we let it? The ocean and tides
challenge borders, carrying and depositing as they
move. These global waves offered our ancestors
an escape to another world as they lifted their
oars and let the current guide them. It is easy to
see how our island ancestors saw this place as
one of mythology and magic, a place to escape
entrapment. Moving with it means an acceptance
of new cycles and paths and of the unknown.
Things ripple and reoccur unresolved on the
same shore. This is the thinking of the ocean;
unknotting our entwined relationship with it
may offer refuge and build new worlds in these
dangerous times.
Unknotting an Evolutionary Tale:
The Sea and Us
It is May 2007, Stephen Munro, an archaeologist
at Australian National University began
photographing a collection of shells gathered in
Java in 1891 by Dutch anthropologist Eugene
Dubois as he searched for the link between homo
sapiens and ape. The photographs revealed
overlooked fossilised evidence that has now
become part of an alternative story of human
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evolution. Under examination the shells showed
deliberate zigzag markings and small punch holes
made with a shark tooth. Dating placed them as
the oldest markings made by our kind and points
to the bountiful intertidal zone as playing a key
role in our evolution. 4 It seems the Neanderthal’s
recognised the potential of this aquatic foraging
zone too with recent excavations of skull bones in
coastal areas showing the occurrence of Surfer’s
Ear, a condition where dense bony growths
protrude into the external auditory canal after
continued submersion of the skull in water. They
too knew the value of the ocean for survival and
learned to dive for food like clams and seaweed
in order to do so. Could it be we learnt to swim
before we walked? 5
However, the standard story of our evolution in
the 20 th century is the Savannah theory. A harsh
theory that proposes that we separated from
our primate cousins when the forests receded
and we were forced to venture onto the African
Savannah, evolving to bipedal mammals in order
to hunt and kill, to survive, with the male of the
species leading the fight. The ability to use tools
developed in order to achieve these primary goals.
This story has fit nicely with many powerful
stories since it became dominant in the 1920s. The
dangerous stories of warfare and technological
advancement at any cost seems closely allied
with a theory of evolution that focuses on one
species, one gender, fighting to survive. But as
with all stories, ‘it matters what stories we tell
these stories with’ and from the 1960s on, many
academics and researchers have asked ‘did human
kind begin on the dry wide Savannahs as hunters
of Africa, or were our origins beside lakes, rivers
and the sea shore, foraging and shallow diving in
the intertidal zone?’
The Aquatic Ape theory, developed by the British
Biologist Alistair Hardy in the 1960s, was met
by contemporary ridicule. 6 He proposed that
certain apes evolved into humans when they
descended from the trees to live, not on the
Savannah but beside the sea, where they could
follow tidal patterns and harness its bountiful
aquatic resources, learning to walk with water as
a support to transition into bipedal beings. One
key question that pointed Hardy towards this new
thinking was asking why, in particular in women,
do humans have a thick layer of sub-cutaneous
fat under their skin? We share this only with the
aquatic mammals he pointed out - nowhere is it
seen in terrestrial kind. Mostly ignored, Hardy’s
ideas were picked up by a popular science
enthusiast and feminist playwright, Elaine
Morgan. Hugely frustrated by the Savannah theory
that left women out of the narrative of human
evolution, Morgan became dedicated to weaving
an alternative story and published ‘The Aquatic
Ape’ in 1982. While there isn’t the space here to
offer up both sides of this argument, it is safe to
say that her book has been key in the turning of
the tide. As fossil evidence is continually revisited
and prominent figures like the palaeontologist
Philip Tobias and Sir David Attenborough get
behind the theory, there is at last an aquatic lens
firmly on the story of our evolution.
The telling of our evolutionary story through a
watery lens makes my focus soften. The status
quo becomes blurred and I’m shifting planes,
building a world view where our greatest resource
was the sea, and the earliest art was scraped on
shells in sea caves. As we followed the ebb and
flow of the tide, we learnt to understand the world
through an aquatic lens.
Swimming in the Mesh:
The Sea as a Sensorium for New Thinking
If we allow the story of our evolution to be tied
closely to this place, the ocean offers ample
metaphorical space to be dazzled. Thinking in
this watery way draws me to two prominent
cultural theorists whose writing ushers us to
think across planes and axes in order to create
space for new visions and tales. In doing so they
propose new modes of aesthetic and ethical
relationship with nature - with the non-human and
with the ocean. Both lay down new tools for us to
rediscover the potential of the sea as something
with which to think and build new worlds. Donna
Haraway’s hybrid thinking binds both human
and non-humans together through what she
calls ‘speculative fabulation’. This is a space very
different to the use of ‘narrative’ in literary theory.
It is a world of wild facts; facts that are never
still, constantly moving and reforming. Drawing
from the metaphor of fables, this is a webbed-like
mesh structure for exploring ontological questions.
Infinite layers exist with no definite backgrounds
or foregrounds, structures are porous and
existence is everywhere. Timothy Morton echoes
Haraway’s interspecies ‘fabulations’ through
his Dark Ecology, 7 a similar mesh-like structure
where the romantic framework of nature as
something ‘over there’ comes crashing down. We
are confronted with the realisation that we exist
in the shadow of a strange ‘other’. This strange
stranger is the recognition that our social space is
in fact borderless and we co-exist with the nonhuman;
be it the ocean, the climate, a sea snake
or a sardine. Haraway and Morton both point to a
strange mesh where the ocular does not dominate
and multisensory languages communicate across
boundaries. I cannot help but think this is the
language of the oceans.
Rediscovering the ocean as a metaphor to
challenge frameworks and communicate with
is evident throughout history, from Melville’s
great whale to the writing of Barbadian poet and
historian Kamu Braithwaite. His poetry springs
from the Atlantic and his ‘tidalectic’ thinking is the
focus of a publication by the same name edited
by the Thysseen-Bornemisza Academy and MIT. 8
Tidalectics brings artists into focus who, like
Yeats use the sea to welcome people to another
world. Brathwaite’s thinking frames these works,
and diving into his world we enter the realm of
the ocean, ‘his poetry mirrors the fluctuating
rhythmic soundings of the waves at sea and their
curling ripples as they wash to the shores’. 9 He
proposes the ‘tidalectic’ as a rejection of western
linear thinking. The tide never returns to the same
shore and, as with the tides, his words swell and
dissolve terrestrial modes of thinking; ‘a being
dedicated to water is a being in flux’ Briathwaite
tells us.
A Sea in Crisis
The 20 th century has seen humankind defined by
linear thinking and not by thinking in flux. With
this we have lost the ability to grasp the expanse
of the water bodies that make up two thirds of our
planet. This detachment brings crisis. The sea is
the most dynamic and sensitive component of our
living planet, yet the least known. It is now in a
new phase of its history, markedly shaped by the
impact of human activities on the earth system.
The Fifth Assessment Report published by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) in 2013 tells us the ocean has ‘absorbed
93% of the extra energy from the enhanced
greenhouse effect, with warming now being
observed at depths of 1,000m’. 10 The result has
been changes in ocean currents, depleted oxygen
zones, extinction of marine species, and shifts
in growing seasons. The list goes on. All of this
defies borders and yet ironically this place has also
become the site of border and political conflict.
As these watery bodies between bordered land
masses become pathways for migrants escaping
warfare and climate displacement they become
graveyards; the Mediterranean alone has claimed
the lives of at least 19,164 migrants since 2014. 11
In another twist to this tale, these ocean graves
are now battlegrounds for deep-sea mining
contracts as demand for global resources pushes
the focus into the ocean. The true impact on
biodiversity of deep-sea mining is immeasurable;
more people have walked the lunar landscape
than have seen the deepest parts of the seabed.
The Rescue
Breaking the surface I refill my lungs. The horizon
appears with ocular clarity but I can’t ignore the
sounds in the distance of the making and doing
of this terrestrial world. I’m still craving the
boundless space below the water, the muffled
and unfocused rippling that occupied my mind
and body. Craving the world of Melville’s whale,
where many meanings and mythologies reveal
themselves. The painter and poet Etel Adnan’s
words flood in, ‘There’s sea, ocean, and turbulent
rivers, and there are the great lakes, matrix of
storms, last refuge for mythologies, sailing ports
and platforms for interstellar voyages.’ 12 She, like
many artists, gives us the gift of showing the
potential of aquatic thinking to break bad old
habits and the dialectics that underpin them; and
in many ways that is the great achievement of
works exhibited in The Sea Around Us.
Rescuing ourselves from the disconnected tapestry
that is mapped out above will require new tools
and it is here where art can carefully darn and
repair. The first thread is its ability to host an idea
we haven’t yet articulated or we don’t see the
need for. Nowhere is this more relevant than in
the work of Forensic Oceanography, whose work
embodies the cross-disciplinary entanglements
that can make the unseen seen. Their broader
practice brings architects, artists, and forensic
scientists together to ‘investigate state and
corporate violence, human rights violations
and environmental destruction all over the
world.’ 13 The footage on view here is harrowing.
The increasing human entanglement with the
ocean as a passage to refuge is exposed in two
Mediterranean crossings by migrants. In bringing
Vertigo Sea, 2015 by John Akomfrah to Sligo the
exhibition welcomes not narratives but situations,
both political and ecological. There is a powerful
positioning of Akomfrah’s work as the opening
piece in this exhibition. His three-screen mix
seems to actualize Haraway’s fabulations, pulling
wild facts and fiction together to journey through
aquatic stories of whaling, colonialisation and
migration. The work is intense and assaulting;
there is little more to do than ‘stay in the trouble’,
a second tool in reconnecting us. In commissioning
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the composer Karen Power to produce new audio
work for the show it fully commits to the nonocular.
The piece, entitled no man’s land, is based
on specially made field recordings that uncover
the unique sonic profile of the Sligo seaboard.
Power, in collaboration with soprano Michelle
O’Rourke, open the exhibition with a performance
immersing us in the tonality of the ocean and
reconnecting us with this otherworldly sensorium.
In Shaun Gladwell’s Storm Sequence, 2000
Morton’s ‘strange stranger’ is evoked, with the
oncoming storm as the ‘other’. The mesmerising
work slowly unfolds with a skateboarder and
the storm dancing together, waves rising behind
him on Bondi Beach, until the storm’s intensity
ends the entanglement; the rhythms of the storm
become too powerful for it to continue. This
feeling of otherness is evident too in Susanne M.
Winterling’s work, planetary opera in three acts,
divided by the currents, 2018; through sound and
image she inverts the relationship between the
ocean and us. We are immersed in a multi-species
experience, where space becomes borderless and
we co-exist with the maritime. Another tool with
which to build new worlds is opened up.
All the works speak on our behalf and in talking
loudly, the complexity of our relationship with
the sea is revealed. The works don’t stand still;
they break the bad habit of viewing the ocean as
something over there and in doing so reconnect
us. Our terrestrial realities blur and new worlds
are built. The words of Emily Dickinson flow in,
‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’. 14 These words
seem to fit this aquatic storytelling place.
I break the surface one last time. Underwater
shards of light shift my gaze – they cut through
planes and I see things slant through the blue
watery world. ‘The truth must dazzle gradually’
Dickinson tells us. Glancing up from the sandy
bottom the light splits and splits again.
Rainbowing, it dazzles me slowly.
Rosie O’Reilly, 2020
Works Cited
1
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the trouble,
Making Kin in the Chthulucene. 2016, Duke
University Press. Durham and London
2
https://maps.biodiversityireland.ie. 28/01/2019
3
Ibid Haraway.
4
‘Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool
production and engraving” https://www.nature.
com/articles/nature13962. 14/02/2020
5
External auditory exostoses among western
Eurasian late Middle and Late Pleistocene humans.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/
article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0220464.
14/02/2020
6
The Waterside Ape. BBC Radio 4 Documentary.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07v0hhm
07/01/2020
7
Morton, Timothy. Dark Ecology. For a Logic of
Future Coexistence. 2016, Columbia University
Press. New York
8
Tiadalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview
through Art and Science. Edited by Stefanie
Hessler. 2018. TBA21-Academy, London. The MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London.
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Ibid Hessler.
10
https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/
ocean-and-climate-change. 05/12/19
11
https://www.iom.int/news/iom-mediterranean-
arrivals-reach-110699-2019-deaths-reach-1283-
world-deaths-fall. 05/02/2020
12
Etal Adnan. Sea and Fog. 2012, Nightboat Books,
New York
13
https://forensic-architecture.org/about/agency.
06/02/2020
14
The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading
Edition, The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1998
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John Akomfrah (b.1957)
Vertigo Sea, 2015
three channel HD colour video installation, 48 mins
In this work, filmmaker John Akomfrah explores man’s
relationship with the sea and its role in the history
of slavery, migration, and conflict. A meditation on
the aquatic sublime, Vertigo Sea brings together a
collection of oblique tales and histories that speak to the
multiple significances of the ocean and humankind’s
often troubling relationship with it.
With sweeping and hypnotic imagery of the aquatic and
cetacean worlds, Vertigo Sea washes in waves over its
audience, bringing with it the traumas, memories and
the hopes of a fractured world.
Touching upon migration, the history of slavery and
colonisation, war and conflict and current ecological
concerns, Vertigo Sea is a narrative on humankind and
nature, on beauty, violence and on the precariousness of
life.
Shot on the Isle of Skye, the Faroe Islands and the
Northern regions of Norway, and including footage
from the BBC’s Natural History Unit, Vertigo Sea draws
upon two remarkable books: Herman Melville’s Moby
Dick (1851) and Heathcote Williams’ epic poem “Whale
Nation” (1988), a harrowing and inspiring work which
charts the history, intelligence and majesty of the largest
mammal on earth.
Courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery,
London.
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Forensic Oceanography
and Forensic Architecture
Forensic Oceanography is a project initiated within the
Forensic Architecture agency by Charles Heller and
Lorenzo Pezzani, in the wake of the Arab uprisings of
2011. It seeks to critically investigate the militarised
border regime imposed by European states across the
EU’s maritime frontier, analysing the political, spatial
and aesthetic conditions that have turned the waters
of the Mediterranean Sea into a deadly liquid for the
illegalised migrants seeking to cross it. The more than
30,000 migrants who have died at and through the sea
over the last 30 years are the victims of what Forensic
Oceanography call “liquid violence”.
By combining human testimonies with traces left
across the digital sensorium of the sea constituted by
radars, satellite imagery and vessel tracking systems,
Forensic Oceanography has mobilised surveillance
means ‘against the grain’ to contest both the violence
of borders and the regime of (in)visibility on which it is
founded.
While the seas have been carved up into a complex
jurisdictional space that allows states to extend their
sovereign claims through police operations beyond the
limits of their territory, but also to retract themselves
from obligations, such as rescuing vessels in distress,
Forensic Oceanography has sought to locate particular
incidents within the legal architecture of the EU’s
maritime frontier, so as to determine responsibility for
them. Forensic Oceanography’s reports have served
as the basis for several legal cases against European
states.
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Presented here is a video
diptych that is part of
investigations undertaken
by Forensic Oceanography
concerning different phases
in the evolving border regime
since 2011. The diptych
brings together The Crime
of Rescue - The Iuventa
Case (2018), which offers a
counter-investigation of the
accusations of collusion used
to justify the seizure of the
rescue NGO boat Iuventa;
and Mare Clausum - The
Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast
Guard Case (2018), which
reconstructs a confrontation
event in which the Libyan
coast guard attempted to
intercept migrants while
the rescue NGO Sea Watch
sought to rescue them.
These videos, both of which
have been produced in
collaboration with Forensic
Architecture, point to the
two entangled dimensions
of the strategy currently
implemented by Italy and
the EU to seal off the central
Mediterranean route:
criminalising solidarity, and
outsourcing border control
to the Tripoli-based Libyan
government and militias.
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Forensic Oceanography
and Forensic Architecture
Mare Clausum – The Sea Watch vs
Libyan Coast Guard Case, 2018
video installation, 28 mins
On the 6 November 2017, the NGO Sea Watch and
the Libyan coast guard were involved in a highly
confrontational event, after both were requested to
rescue a boat carrying more than 130 migrants. The
intercepted migrants however sought to evade their
fate of violence at the hands of their Libyan captors
by swimming towards the rescue NGO vessels, which
offered the prospect of safety in Europe instead.
Sea Watch managed to recover 59 people who were
brought to Italy, while 47 passengers were pulled-back
to Libya, where several were subjected to grave
violations. At least 20 passengers died before and
during the rescue. This video reconstruction offers a
striking illustration of the lethal outcomes of Italy and
the EU’s policy of externalisation of border control.
It is part of the “Mare Clausum” report by Forensic
Oceanography, which has served as the basis for a legal
complaint against Italy submitted to the European Court
of Human Rights.
Project team Forensic Oceanography: Charles Heller,
Lorenzo Pezzani, Rossana Padeletti
Project team Forensic Architecture: Stefan Laxness,
Stefanos Levidis, Grace Quah, Nathan Su,
Samaneh Moafi, Christina Varvia, Eyal Weizman
Produced with the support of the WatchTheMed
platform, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the
Republic and Canton of Geneva
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Forensic Oceanography
and Forensic Architecture
The Crime of Rescue – The Iuventa
Case, 2018
video installation, 33 mins
On 2 August 2017, the ship Iuventa of the German
NGO Jugend Rettet (‘Youth Rescue’) was seized by the
Italian judiciary under suspicion of “aiding and abetting
illegal immigration” and collusion with smugglers. The
video presented here offers a counter-investigation of
the authorities’ version of the events, and a refutation
of their accusations. While the latter operate by
decontextualising factual elements and recombining
them into a spurious chain of events, our analysis
attempts instead to cross-reference all elements of
evidence into a coherent spatiotemporal model. This
video has been part of the legal defence of Jugend
Rettet. The Iuventa remains to this day under custody of
the Italian police in the port of Trapani, Sicily.
Project team Forensic Oceanography: Charles Heller,
Lorenzo Pezzani, Rossana Padaletti, Richard Limeburner
Project Team Forensic Architecture: Nathan Su,
Christina Varvia, Eyal Weizman, Grace Quah
Produced with the support of Borderline Europe, the
WatchTheMed platform and Transmediale
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Forensic Oceanography
The European Union’s Lethal
Maritime Frontier: Illegalised
Migration, Bordering and Deaths at
Sea, Central Mediterranean,
2011–2018 (2019)
vinyl timeline
Presented here is a video diptych that is part of
investigations undertaken by Forensic Oceanography
concerning different phases in the evolving border
regime since 2011. The content on each screen analyses
and contests a particular mode of border violence, all
the while drawing a political anatomy of the fluctuating
patterns of border control and (non)assistance at
sea, and their dramatic consequences for the lives of
migrants. These broad trends are here summarised in a
timeline.
Project team: Charles Heller, Lorenzo Pezzani,
Gian-Andrea Monsch, Bob Trafford, Robert Preusse
Courtesy Forensic Oceanography and Forensic
Architecture.
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Shaun Gladwell (b.1972)
Storm Sequence, 2000
single channel digital video, colour, sound, 8 mins
Shaun Gladwell is an Australian contemporary artist
who works predominantly in video and performance.
His works are shot within natural and urban
environments, and explore the relationship between
landscapes and people while simultaneously drawing
deeply from art and literary history.
Storm Sequence is a deceptively simple work. It depicts
the solitary action of a skateboarder – the artist, Shaun
Gladwell – freestyling on the edge of a concrete drop
in front of the ocean at Bondi Beach in Sydney. The
camera hardly moves and concentrates only on his
movements, as he pirouettes and spins. Incorporating
an organic, liquid-like soundtrack by Sydney composer
Kazumichi Grime, the footage is presented at a reduced
framerate to give the illusion of slow motion. Movement
which in real time would have a jerky rhythm becomes
graceful, emphasising the relationship between the
individual, the ocean and the oncoming storm.
Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.
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Karen Power (b. 1977)
no man’s land, 2020
eight channel audio installation, 40mins
no man’s land is a multifunctional composition
presented as both an eight channel sound installation
and a live performance for voice and composed field
recordings, all of which lie in conversation with the
major surrounding artworks of The Sea Around Us.
This entire composition is based on Power’s field
recordings of the sea from many locations, including
new site-specific recordings made throughout Sligo’s
waterways over the six-month period of this project.
Subtle additions to the installation had being planned,
mapping local and seasonal sea changes.
The concept and structure of this sound installation
emulates the living and ever-changing state of our
ocean, as simultaneously constant and fleeting, fragile
and robust, volatile and calm, while at the same time
being mesmerising, beautiful, alluring, harsh, and
encompassing all of life and death.
Courtesy the artist, supported by the Arts Council
Music Project Awards.
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Susanne M. Winterling (b.1971)
planetary opera in three acts, divided
by the currents, 2018
12 channel sound installation, 7 mins
planetary loop of gravitation, 2018
4K projection mapping, 7 mins
flags of the miracular (welcome to
the algae empire), 2018
textile, bamboo
planetary opera in three acts, divided by the currents
is a composition of natural and synthetic, as well
as documentary and imaginary sounds, including
hydrophone recordings of algae, the sound of green
turtles hatching, crabs rubbing their claws together and
other ecological marvels. The opera is accompanied by
planetary loop of gravitation, and flags of the miracular
(welcome to the algae empire), both 2018. These works
immerse the spectator in a field of floating particles
- at once reminiscent of the sky, the deep sea, and
interplanetary space - as gargantuan algae whirl and
dance around them.
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These pieces enact a sensory
inversion of the dominant
anthropocentric logics
which govern our awareness
through their dramatic
reversals of scale and focus,
deploying historical forms
of media usually associated
with the internal drama
of humankind, to instead
express the drama of the
planet. Participants are
immersed within a grand
marine imaginary which
aims to generate a new sense
of interspecies alliance with
the creatures that dwell
within planetary space and
through the currents.
Courtesy the artist and
Empty Gallery, supported by
the Goethe Institut Irland.
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Cover: Susanne M. Winterling, planetary opera in three acts, divided by the currents, 2018.
12-channel sound installation. planetary loop of gravitation, 2018. Computer generated imagery
mapped projection for curved screen 4K, 9 min. Photo: Michael Yu. Courtesy the artist and Empty
Gallery.
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The Sea Around Us
John Akomfrah (GH/GB), Forensic Oceanography and Forensic
Architecture (GB), Shaun Gladwell (AU), Karen Power (IE),
Susanne M. Winterling (DE).
Curated by Emer McGarry
The Model; home of The Niland Collection
29 Feb. – 31 May 2020
Publication design
Concepta Boyce
Image credits
Installation Shots
Heike Thiele, Daniel Paul McDonald and Barry McHugh
John Akomfrah
© Smoking Dogs Films, courtesy Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson
Gallery
Forensic Oceanography and Forensic Architecture
© Forensic Oceanography and Forensic Architecture
Shaun Gladwell
© Shaun Gladwell, courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery
Karen Power
Page 57, images by John Godfrey
Susanne M. Winterling
© Susanne M. Winterling, images by Michael Yu, courtesy the artist
and Empty Gallery
This exhibition is sponsored by Hazelwood House, Sligo.
With additional support from Goethe Institut Irland, Ecclesiastical Insurance and Arts
Council Music Project Award.
The Model; home of The Niland Collection
The Mall, Sligo | (071) 9141405 | themodel.ie
Registered Charity No. CHY 12212
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