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About The Current

Laura Anderson Barbata, What-Lives-Beneath, Jamaica, 2016. Photo: Wade Rhoden.

Joan Jonas. Moving Off the Land II, at Ocean Space, 2019. Photo: Enrico Fiorese.

Diver by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Papua New Guinea, 2015.

Eduardo Navarro, Underwater drawing, New Zealand, 2018. Photo by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Mathilde Rosier, Sensing the Seas, Venice, 2018. Photo: Enrico Fiorese.

Convening #2: Phenomenal Ocean at Ocean Space, Venice, 2019. Photo: Enrico Fiorese

Deep Sea Minding, Hunga Tonga, 2018. Photo: Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza.

We Passed Through Earth Lightly as Water, a group trip. Sardinia, 2022. Photo: Barbara Pau.

The Current

TBA21–Academy

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

Organized as a three-year-long curatorial fellowship program, The Current is a pioneering initiative that cultivates transdisciplinary practices and the exchange of ideas around bodies of water and their understanding.

It aims to form strong connections to local networks, map the contemporary issues concerning watery worlds, and weave them into an interdisciplinary conversation, embracing the spheres of science, conservation, policy, and education. The Current strives to explore and co-create common grounds among various disciplines concerning the Ocean through the means of proximity, collaborative research, and long-term engagement.

Each cycle of The Current is led by one or more curatorial fellows selected by the Academy, who in turn nominate artists, scientists, environmentalists, and other cultural actors to join a collective research project unfolding over three years. Since its inception in 2015, cycles of the Fellowship program have been led by curators Ute Meta Bauer and Chus Martínez and the artist group SUPERFLEX.

TBA21–Academy continuously develops the research and practices of its current, former, and future networks. The Current is also a catalyst for further investigations, collaborations, imaginaries, and productions. The research, process, findings, and objects of knowledge will be made manifest in the Ocean Space program through exhibitions of new commissions and public programming and shared with the public through various channels, including Ocean Archive.

THE CURRENT IV

The Current IV: Caribbean: "otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua" (other mountains, adrift beneath the waves)

Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel, The Current IV, 2023–2025, intends to contribute to the emancipatory processes in the region that have sought to bring its inhabitants closer to the Ocean and that began in the high mountains above sea level. The project will focus on identifying, studying, and spreading the knowledge of the aesthetic strategies and tools generated from the Maroon experience in the Caribbean through the production of aesthetic thought, based on the premise that this approach will bring us closer to inhabiting the mountains that are below the level of the Caribbean Sea, as they were aesthetic practices that sought to reconcile the human body with the constant movement — the Ocean.