The Seas' Blue Yonder

How can the art of our time reimagine new, post-humanist perspectives on the relationship of humans to non-humans within the surrounding natural world? In the exhibition Sjávarblámi / The Seas’ Blue Yonder, artists Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson offer an integrated approach to understanding the relationship between whales and humans.

For more than two decades, Bryndís and Mark have worked at the forefront of interdisciplinary, research-based investigations into moral philosophical questions about interspecies relations — a discourse made more critical at a time of planetary crisis. Considering the work of scientists and scholars from various fields of study as part of their research methods, the artists examine human-animal interaction, illuminating how ecological, cultural, and social factors influence both human and more-than-human behavior and ecosystems. Through multiple means, here including prints, ink drawings, sculpture, mixed media, sound and video works, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson offer an alternative vision, one that is grounded in discursive cultural history while drawing on iconographic references. In Seas’ Blue Yonder, they focus on the traces of individual whales they have tracked – either through narratives or directly through fieldwork undertaken in Skjálfandi Bay, near Húsavík – in juxtaposition with the paradox of whale strandings and echoes of Iceland’s recent whaling history, providing an opportunity to recalibrate a complex and conflicted relationship between humans and whales.

Photo: Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson
Minke Whale, Álftanes, Ísland, 2024 (from the series Windfall)
Ink wash on paper
Collection of the artists