Island to Island

Exhibiting Oceans in the UK Today Symposium
Including Artist’s lecture by Gabriella Hirst and screening of work by by Angela YT Chan  

Date & time: 1 December 2023
Location: Sainsbury Centre, Norwich

Since the start of the recent deluge of ocean-themed exhibitions, curators have taken increasingly localised, politicised and thereby experimental approaches to curating the sea (Syperek & Wade 2023). In the UK this has meant addressing the potential for both isolation and connectivity of our island nation. Amidst rising seas, coastal erosion, Brexit, culture wars, slavery’s legacies, migration and hostile borders, our islandness (Perry 2018) has never been more pronounced. This symposium featured several curators of recent and current exhibitions and programmes addressing these and related issues in various locations across the British Isles, and artists whose work engages with relevant themes. Through considering these diverse practices we will reflect on past and present practices and look to future directions. 

Featured videos:

'States of Hydration', a screening of work by Angela YT Chan
Angela examines the expansive growth of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, linking it to human activities like deforestation and fertilizer use. Through a series of collages, Chan reflects on seaweeds' roles in ecological storytelling, cultural memory, and the socio-political implications of climate change.

Ambergris, a lecture by Gabriella Hirst
Gabriella presents her current research which centres upon myths and murmurings of people being swallowed by, and living within, the bellies of whales.

Over recent months as a guest artist for Radar’s Ecological Thinking program, Gabriella had been thinking through the whale as a creature symbolic of social and economic systems centred on extractivism, and as an animal imbued with layered erotic and gendered associations.

Ambergris imagines whale ribcages as mass greenhouses, understands spermaceti as pre-petroleum, and considers how the rapidly industrialising world was once held un-cozily in the blankets and baleen of the dis-assembled bodies of feminised cetaceans. Galanic medical theory, sunken city archives and a hollowed-out Swedish juvenile whale carcass decompose together with forgotten art history lessons, cartoon anxieties and social media fixations.