A Danish Art Show Examines Our Awe, and Terror, of the Deep
The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, roughly 25 miles north of Copenhagen, occupies a sprawling estate on Denmark's eastern coast. From its sculpture garden, featuring works by Alexander Calder and Henry Moore, the eye travels out over the cliff to the Oresund Sound. On the other side of that shimmering water, roughly eight miles away, lies Sweden.
This is a spectacular setting for any exhibition, but is particularly well suited for the one now on view: 'Ocean,' an expansive look at the pull that the deep has exerted on the human imagination (through April 27).
That topic is, of course, as vast and fathomless as the sea itself. The roughly 130 artworks and objects that comprise 'Ocean' are spread over an entire wing of the museum and include paintings, sculptures, photos and videos, as well as scientific specimens, archaeological finds and even live fish.
Through these objects, the exhibition fuses past with present and art with science to illuminate how our shifting perspectives have always shaped how we understand and interact with the sea.
Thematic and multidisciplinary exhibitions like 'Ocean' and earlier ones held at the Louisiana, including 'The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Outer Space,' which ran in 2018, might strike some museum-goers as unexpected — not the sort of fare they are used to seeing at a modern art museum. According to Poul Erik Tojner, the museum's director since 2000, these kinds of shows can also serve as a refreshing corrective.
'You sometimes get the impression that everybody thinks that art is only about art, which is a nice point of view, but it is obvious that art also has an extreme potential for talking about the world,' said Tojner, who also is one of the show's three Danish curators.
He said that assembling a show of disparate works — which here included marble statues retrieved from the ocean floor, an 18th-century shell cabinet with more than 800 specimens, and precious minerals from the seabed — 'is a way of reactivating a lot of stories and narratives that are inherent in artworks.'
'Both the moon and the ocean are really motors for all kinds of myths and rituals and religious thinking,' added Tine Colstrup, the show's lead curator, who joined Tojner on a recent tour of the exhibition. 'So it's interesting to explore these themes and kind of let knowledge areas join forces,' she continued.
Visitors to 'Ocean' are greeted by enlargements of pages from Anna Atkins's 'Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions' (1843-1853), often considered the world's first photography book. Atkins, a Victorian-era botanist, placed seaweed on an emulsion that turned Prussian blue when exposed to light, leaving white, shadow-like impressions where the algae had been — a method familiar to anyone who has ever made sun prints.
Her dreamlike and semi-abstract images help to set the tone for the contents of the opening galleries, with their emphasis on how rapidly evolving technology has both demystified the sea and made it the subject of art over the past 150 years.
Inside the first room is the Lithuanian artist Emilija Skarnulyte's large-scale video installation 'Aphotic Zone' (2022), in which documentary footage from deep-sea research expeditions is blended with fictional, digital visions of a post-human underwater world.
Colstrup felt it was important to introduce the theme of the exhibition in an aesthetic, rather than an intellectual, way. 'When we talk about the ocean, yes it's science and we have climate change, but it's also beauty, and it's something sensual,' she said.
In the next gallery, visitors are invited to compare the high-definition video that Skarnulyte used in 'Aphotic Zone' with earlier underwater films by Jean Painlevé, whose cinematic portraits of octopuses and sea horses are every bit as astonishing as they were nearly a century ago, and by the popular deep-sea diver and explorer Jacques Cousteau. The footage from the pioneering aquatic filmmakers that is in the show suggests that contemporary deep-sea video would be unthinkable without their innovations.
From there the show dives further back in time, with a stunning display of 19th-century glass models of marine invertebrates, among them sea slugs and cephalopods. They are the painstaking work of the father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, master glass artisans from Dresden, Germany. They made their menagerie largely for research purposes and with meticulous scientific observation, mechanical precision and a dash of creativity.
These exquisite, fragile objects, whose wild colors, astounding detail and high degree of verisimilitude make them look like psychedelic pastries, are among the most dazzling works in 'Ocean.' But even the more conventional presentations contain surprises.
In a room dedicated to the sublime, a key motif in Romantic art, violent depictions of the sea abound. The first item in that gallery, however, is a poster for the 2000 disaster film 'The Perfect Storm' by the German director Wolfgang Petersen, starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. The poster unmistakably revisits the iconography of 19th-century paintings of shipwrecks, with a beleaguered vessel surfing the wave of a digitally rendered squall.
With this somewhat cheeky choice, the exhibition makes the point that our imaginations are still as riveted by the overwhelming violence and passion of the sea as they were over two centuries ago, when Caspar David Friedrich painted 'After the Storm' (1817), which also features in the exhibition.
'Ocean' also reckons with painful narratives, including the legacy of colonialism and slavery.
The Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's haunting sculpture 'Akua's Surviving Children' (1996) evokes historical crimes and traumas through driftwood sculptures made with wood collected from a beach roughly a dozen miles north of this museum. The artist assembled the work, a group of standing figures that recalls Rodin's 'The Burghers of Calais,' at a nearby former arms factory that produced long-barreled flintlock muskets known as Dane guns, weapons that played a key role in the Danish slave trade in Ghana.
Colstrup said she was particularly glad to have Anatsui's work in the show given how Denmark's role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade remained something of a historical blind spot for the country. 'It's an extremely political and very local piece,' she said.
Nearby, the ocean is depicted not only as a site of oppression but also of resilience and rebirth. The two companion paintings that make up the American artist Ellen Gallagher's 'Fast Fish and Loose Fish' (2023) reference the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya — an alternative Black history of an underwater utopia populated by descendants of enslaved Africans thrown from slave ships.
Kara Walker's collage 'Rift of the Medusa' (2017) offers a Black and feminist response to Théodore Géricault's famous painting 'The Raft of the Medusa,' which depicts the deadly aftermath of an 1816 shipwreck off the West African coast.
As the show progresses, it leaves behind the myths — old and new — that the ocean has inspired in favor of a more explicit confrontation with environmental crises.
'We didn't want to make a climate show,' said Colstrup. At the same time, she acknowledged that when putting together an exhibition like this, it was impossible to ignore the strain — plastic pollution, rising sea levels and marine biodiversity loss — on the ocean right now.
In 'Flooded McDonald's,' a video by the Danish art collective Superflex, a replica of the fast-food restaurant is submerged beneath murky water, with a bobbing statue of Ronald McDonald and trash — the debris of consumer culture — floating eerily through the abandoned interior.
In the Danish-born artist Kirsten Justesen's 'Mer Maid / Hav Frue' (1990), 16 small black-and-white images arranged in a four-by-four grid, a modern-day Venus in a bathing suit vacuums pollution from the sea — a comment both on environmental neglect and an assertion of female resilience.
One of the concluding pieces -— and one of the exhibition's highlights — is 'Vertigo Sea,' by the Ghanaian-born British artist John Akomfrah. The three-screen video installation that blends historical imagery of whaling, migration and ecological disasters was first screened at the Venice Biennale in 2015. The 48-minute-long film presents the ocean and humans' interactions with it as part beauty, part horror.
Placing the video toward the end of 'Ocean' makes sense; it underscores one of the exhibition's preoccupations: that the ocean, endlessly symbolic and physically finite, demands understanding and responsible stewardship.
Colstrup recalled something that ocean scientists and marine biologists told her when she was putting the show together. 'If we are to protect something, anything, we need to know it exists and we need to love it.'
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