dark, liquid.

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The exhibition dark, liquid brings together artistic positions and scientific exhibits to question them about their knowledge of an object that is as multi-layered as it is impermanent, that breaks scales and transcends categories, and yet seems to be as highly familiar as it is capable of enduring fascination: the sea.

The exhibition is interested in the forms of knowledge with which contemporary art and research operate when they encounter this space that can only be measured by media. The focus is on the correspondences that open up when, for example, contemporary sculptures meet recording systems of deep-sea research or scientific preparations meet sound installations. Under what conditions does a video work produce knowledge about the sea and what aesthetics does the oceanographic research instrumentation serve on the other hand? Or what can paint captured on canvas know about the continuous movement of the oceanic? Not least up for debate is the way in which any knowledge of the sea is necessarily determined by specific practices, media and objects, and the extent to which the sea in turn liquefies and is able to renegotiate the boundaries between art and science and between factual and fictional knowledge.

Roger Wardin’s paintings, at any rate, know a great deal about the sea. On his canvases, the Berlin artist explores the materialities and physical processes of oceanic spaces and elevates their contingency to a painterly practice. Reiner Maria Matysik’s biofacts, models of living beings between nature and culture, hint at deep-sea creatures whose lifestyles soften the boundaries between fact and fiction in both popular and biological knowledge. Jenny Michel’s sound installation, which takes technical and biological drawings as its point of departure and acoustically explores the gallery spaces along with the research equipment on display, is also organically proliferating. In his video work, Gregor Peschko takes a look at contemporary art and its presentation at the interface between surface and depth. Alongside transparency, depth also plays a prominent role in Angela Glajcar’s layered works on paper. In combination with geological specimens, they also open up perspectives on forms of cartographic visualisation and temporality. The videos and sculptures of the English artist Rona Lee, on the other hand, were created in direct exchange with oceanographers and through reading feminist theory. They sensorially intertwine the “negative” space below the surface of the sea with the subconscious and lend positive forms to the unknowable.

curated by Julia Heunemann

With the kind support of Northumbria University for Rona Lee’s participation in the exhibition, and the district support funds of the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.

Thanks to: GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, especially Gerd Hoffmann-Wieck, and to Tracey Williams of Lego Lost At Sea.

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