with works by Susanne Winterling, John Akomfrah, Forensic Oceanography, Shaun Gladwell and Karen Power
"The Sea Around Us" is an ambitious, large-scale group exhibition that explores our complex relationship with the ocean through installation, film, participation and sound. John Akomfrah’s epic film ''Vertigo Sea and Forensic Oceanography’s Liquid Violence'' (2017) bookend a conversation on humankind’s interactions with the sea. German artist Susanne M. Winterling’s installation ''Gravitational Currents & The Life Magic'' is another central work of the exhibition. In addition, there are works from Karen Power and Rosie O’Reilly (IE).
The works in this exhibition reflect the motion of the sea, at a time when rapid change is rocking the very foundations of the world we live in. Through these visual and sound-based works, we invite you to contemplate the ebb and flow of the ocean, and humankinds’ multi-faceted relationship with it. 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.
“Jack Butler Yeats spent his boyhood in Sligo town, a small port on the Atlantic edge … The sea brought the outside world to the doors of a small town in a casual mention of foreign cities, strange words and wild doings.” Ernie O’Malley, 1945
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.
Susanne Winterling (born 1970) is a German artist, who works with various kinds of media, including film, photography, sculpture, and performance. She is especially known for her time-related installations which critically deal with representing reality. Exhibitions (selection): ''Myths of the Marble'', HOK Oslo and ICA Philadelphia; ''An Inventory of Shimmers'', MIT List Center Boston; Contour Biennale 2017; ''Sitevisit'', Kunstverein Freiburg; ''Complicity'', Kunstverein Amsterdam; ''Tidalectics'', TBA21 Wien and MoMa Dubrovnik; ''Between Bodies'', Henry Art Museum University of Washington and Luleåbiennalen 2018.
Supported by the Goethe-Institut Irland
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