Ocean STAGE: Ocean Heritage and the Deep Sea

Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa

Busan Museum of Art (BMA), Busan, South Korea

3:00 PM KST

Lecture Performance (Aphotic Zone)

Lecture performance by Emilija Škarnulytė

Drawing on the research and imagery of Aphotic Zone, presented in Ocean STAGE, Emilija Škarnulytė will combine live narration and video to explore how technologies of exploration shape our understanding of the deep sea and how human activity leaves traces in geological time.

5:00 PM KST

A Common Heritage of All Kinds

Screenings and conversation with Jane Jin Kaisen and Haley Ha

Screenings of Halmang (2023) and Portal (2024) explore the knowledge and ritual practices of the haenyeo, the women divers of Jeju, and the relationships between marine life, volcanic landscapes, and the island’s cosmologies.

Following the screenings, Jane Jin Kaisen will join curator Haley Ha in conversation about how these relationships can expand our understanding of ocean heritage and the responsibilities involved in caring for it. The artist will share materials from her research in Jeju and Jamaica. The event will include an audience Q&A.

Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980 Jeju, Korea, lives in Copenhagen, Denmark) is an artist and filmmaker known for her visually striking, multilayered, performative, poetic, and multi-voiced feminist works concerning memory, migration, and borders conceived at the intersection of lived experience and larger political histories. Other long-term commitments revolve around nature and island spaces, cosmologies, questions of sustainability and preservation of intangible cultures. Kaisen was awarded the Beckett Prize (2023), the New Carlsberg Foundation Artist Grant (2023) and a 3-year work grant from the Danish Arts Foundation (2022). She participated in the 2024 Korea Artist Prize at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.

Haley Ha is a curator and Artist-at-Sea Manager at Schmidt Ocean Institute. Her work connects contemporary art, ecology and public engagement. Previously, she served as a public programs curator at the Seattle Art Museum and led initiatives across independent art spaces and public art institutions, bringing together field-based research, performance, time-based media, and public convenings. At Schmidt Ocean Institute, she supports artists’ participation in marine research expeditions and builds partnerships and exhibitions linking art and ocean science.

Emilija Škarnulytė is a Lithuanian artist and filmmaker born in Vilnius in 1987. Her films and immersive installations move between documentary and imagined scenarios, exploring deep time and the often invisible structures that shape the world, from geological processes to ecological and political systems. She received the Future Generation Art Prize in 2019. Her work has been presented at institutions including Tate Modern and is held in collections including the Center Pompidou.