Sea Inside CAA

Sea Inside: Oceanic Interiority in Art and Visual Culture 
Chaired by Pandora Syperek, Loughborough University London/V&A and Sarah Wade, University of East Anglia  

Session date and time: Saturday, February 15, 09:00 AM- 10:30 AM Eastern Time

Location: On location at the New York Hilton Midtown, in room: Murray Hill West  

This session takes an inward gaze towards the sea, exploring marine interconnections and immersion through interior spaces, whether architectural, bodily or imaginary. From nature writer Rachel Carson (1950) to Oceanian scholar and poet Teresia Teaiwa (1998), many have observed that the sea lives inside us, coursing through our blood, sweat and tears, a testament to shared oceanic origins. While humans evolved from the sea and are born from watery wombs, oceans are also associated with the inner spaces of the mind, with Freud famously labelling a state of psychic oneness the ‘oceanic feeling’.  

In contrast to this sense of boundlessness, marine interiors have been theorised in terms of the bourgeois domesticity of the shell (Benjamin 1938), commodity fetishism in the underwater grotto and submarine (Olalquiaga 1999), the immersive affect of the aquarium (Hayward 2012) and hapticality in the slave ship hold (Harney & Moten 2013). Many Indigenous and diasporic communities maintain intimate relationships to the sea, yet European and settler-colonial traditions have viewed it as an unknowable Other. The sublime ‘open sea’ and its seemingly fathomless depths dominate Western art history and marine imagery. Conversely, this session explores the ways oceans have been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale or brought inside the dry air of the gallery, whether to be tamed, contained or better understood.  

Expanding on the research project Curating the Sea (2017-present), this session examines these themes in art, display and visual-material culture across eras and regions.  

Madeline Porsella, Yale University: Deformed Milieus: Symbolist Architecture and the Nineteenth-Century Aquarium  

Alex Zivkovic, Columbia University: Exhibiting Sculpture Underwater: A History of Milieu  

Karen Jacobs, Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia: A Sea of Resilience: Oceanic (In)visibility  

Annie Simpson, Harvard University Graduate School of Design and James Enos, University of Georgia: How to Measure/Cutting Short