The Ocean After Nature

For centuries, the ocean has figured as a vast unknown space loaded with notions of the sublime and the exotic. In the past 15 years however, global technological and economic shifts have triggered new concerns and understandings of it. Today’s oceans reveal the consequences of human actions. As the ocean and humanity exist in a relationship of mutual and potentially destructive influence, this exhibition considers the ocean as reflecting the ecological, cultural, political, and economic realities of a globalised world through the work of 20 artists and collectives that explore new ways of representing the seascape as a means to identify and critique the various interrelated and chaotic systems of power, such as land-sea divides, the circulation of people and goods, and the vulnerabilities of our ecosystems.