Posts tagged exhibition

Preview: Hydrarchy – Transitional and Transformative Seas - by Hannah Mae Cooper

In October 1967, the Suez Canal’s Bitter Lake became home to fourteen international cargo ships, trapped in a legal grey zone caused by the Six-Day War. Officially un-allowed to contact the shore, the ships were stuck for eight years, the crews continued with operations as their contracts required them to do so.

The few available traces of this intriguing but little-known anecdote were researched by artist Uriel Orlow; one of the many amazing, but unseen stories of the sea explored by Hydrarchy.

Opening Friday, December 9^TH, 7:00PM at Contemporary Image Collective (CIC), this exhibition leaves land to explore the sea, the ship, and the offshore as “remarkable and contested cultural, political, legal and socio-economic territories”; intertwined with both historical and contemporary narratives of resistance. As conventional shipping and state military forces take full advantage of the sea, non-state actors such as pirates and ‘illegal’ migrants also make use of the sea’s flexible circumstances by achieving their goals through constantly changing tactics and opportunities.

Hydrarchy – Transitional and Transformative Seas is the second part of a two-phase project, which started with Hydrarchy - Power and Resistance at Sea 

that took place in London at Gasworks and the University of Central London in September 2010.

As a volunteer worker at CIC, I had the chance to talk more with Mia Jankowicz, CIC’s art director and as one arm of Hydrarchy’s curatorial team, she provided insight into the conceptualization of the exhibition and its overall relationship to both historical and present-day Egypt:

“Doing a show about the sea might seem like a strange and distant topic but myself and Anna Colin, the show’s co-curator, realized how little we factor in the sea when we discuss global politics. We think of history as something that happens on land, but when you look at the ways in which the sea is used by pirates, offshore financiers, smugglers and ‘irregular’ migrants - not to mention the enormous wealth of cultural material about the sea - you realize the sea provides a lot of amazing ‘loopholes’ for us to break the rules and consider the world differently.”

The sea is indeed a fascinating subject and in relationship to Egypt’s waters,

Jankowicz explains, “Egypt is not typically a maritime country, but its fate has been tied to ‘water’ factors. Look at Suez, which for thousands of years, people have wanted to develop and control as a shipping route, and in the 20th Century Suez has become an immensely symbolic site of military and nationalist pride. We became fascinated by issues like these where the use and control of water routes became not only historical events in themselves, but actually shape the world as we know it.”

Without giving too much away, the exhibition includes seven international artists or groups – some who talk very directly to matters involving Egypt including Uriel Orlow’s work on the Suez Canal and the research group, Take to the Sea, who looks into Egyptian migration across the Mediterranean. Others take a more symbolic approach such as Ayed Arafah’s piece about the idea of a sea in Ramallah, or Lawrence Weiner’s work using the language of navigation.

As Hydrarchy includes a symposium on January 6^th, the project offers the chance to explore its ideas in more depth, and more closely in the context of Egypt’s politics today. The keynote lecture is by postcolonial theorist Iain Chambers, who has long looked at Mediterranean cultural relations, through a process he calls ‘maritime criticism”; he will be in conversation with the Egypt-based research group Take To The Sea.

The exhibition will run from December 9^TH- January 21^st. Do not miss this!