Oceanic Curating

Abstract

Oceans have proliferated in artworks and exhibitions in recent years, coinciding with a surge of scholarship in the blue humanities and critical ocean studies. However, despite the extensive art history of the sea, artistic and curatorial knowledge has been relatively underrepresented within marine explorations in the environmental humanities. Meanwhile, an abundance of curatorial projects that take the sea as a subject forms a rich repository of innovative thought and practice, pioneering in both oceanic content and methods. This article examines the various curatorial strategies deployed and critiqued in recent exhibitions, drawing on the authors’ long-term research project Curating the Sea, which has involved both primary art historical research and collaborations with curators of art and natural history as well as contemporary artists. Here the authors chart a shift from the display of contemporary marine-themed “cabinets of curiosity” toward more localized and politicized curatorial responses, from awe in the face of the aquatic sublime toward commitment to interdisciplinary and multispecies collaboration. They argue for curatorial practice’s unique capacity to respond to the plurality of oceans and their communities, histories, geographies, and ecologies, demonstrating that such activity does not merely reflect but itself constitutes recent oceanic cultural and theoretical currents.