Underwater

About

Around 375 million years ago, our ancestors crawled out of the waters... Underwater is about the experience of total submersion; we invite you to return to the watery depths once more. The exhibition of painting, sculpture, photography and video by ten international artists brings together the most compelling underwater- inspired artworks of the past decade, and proposes that underwater is a compelling motif of our times. The show includes three mesmerising videos. In Bill Viola's two lovers intertwine as they slowly descend into dark waters, exhaling their last breath together. In Janaina Tschäpe's a woman's head rocks from side to side beneath the water surface; is she in a trance, dreaming, or perhaps sexually aroused? In Dorothy Cross' video a woman wafts in sunlit water teeming with jellyfish. Drawings by Ed Pien suggest a nightmarish underwater realm, in which ghastly creatures do battle. Another by Ellen Gallagher conjectures a monstrous creature from the depths, part natural history specimen, part science fiction. Daniel Gustav Cramer photographs a deathly and ominous seabed of towering rocks and rising silts — a microcosm of barrenness and decay. Straight from the pages of Jules Verne, a motorised model submarine by Cut and Scrape lurches about in the clutches of a giant squid, while Klaus Osterwald's tapering metallic sculptures emit the strange chirrupings of fish, recorded by underwater microphones. More abstractly, Shirley Kaneda's paintings are concerned with the state of liquidity, her precise yet free squiggles a play on refraction and reflection. Seunghyun Woo's sculptures of imaginary aquatic flora and fauna likewise suggest liquid movement and distortion.