Sarah Cameron Sunde: Performing with The Sea

North Sea, Bay of Bengal, Bay of All Saints, Bodo Inlet

September 4-October 8, 2020

During Hurricane Sandy, the artist Sarah Cameron Sunde watched rising water engulf New York City and saw a painful metaphor of inundation. The water, like rent, kept rising, yet another reflection of the unsustainability of life in the 21st century.

Less than a year later, Sunde stepped into the waters of Bass Harbor, Maine, to begin the ongoing series, “36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea.” Sunde began the work in order to utilize the urgency of environmental, political, and social cataclysm to create awareness, community, and change. In each iteration, Sunde enters a body of water at low tide and remains in a fixed position until high tide, allowing the tide to rise in a slow but threatening surge, reaching up to her neck.

Since the first performance in 2013, Sunde has completed seven of an expected nine performances, which have taken place in a range of locations, including Maine, Kenya, Bangladesh, Brazil, The Netherlands, and San Francisco. Before each, Sunde works with the local community, and partners with local arts organizations, local filmmakers, and individuals she encounters during her preparation. In each iteration of the project, Sunde has asked her collaborators, “What is your relationship to the sea?” Their responses helped her determine where to stand, how the installation on the shore looked, as well as the interventions of local artists and musicians—all the elements that made up the work.

The people Sunde has listened to and worked with become the voices of the project. Sunde hopes that she walks into the water with the community, both local and global, alongside her, transforming for viewers the way we think about bodies and their contexts and the assumed “we,” which might have been formless and nameless but which is now a politicized and conscious body that sees the realities of climate change and its selective oppression. The twelve to thirteen hours she spends in the sea is intended to be a small step of one body becoming many, that the “us” that is all of us, and the problem is ours to share.

Eight years after Hurricane Sandy, the rising tide of the coronavirus has covered the planet. It is yet another warning. Warning after warning has been issued in the form of viruses, as well as from clear cut forests and smog-filled cities, plastic-filled oceans and from water crises in places like Flint, Michigan, and from bureaucratic and engineering failures in Fukushima, Japan. 2020 is scarred by a viral pandemic but also with political failures and environmental catastrophe.

Sunde has prepared for the final immersion of “36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea,” in New York, the city where the piece first began. The decision to place the final performance here begs the question: if the city that fancies itself the greatest city in the world—in the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world—isn’t safe from the caprices of climate, how will the rest of the world fare?

At present, a third of Bangladesh is underwater and the country is wracked by COVID-19. India has over 40,000 dead of the virus and from landslides. Peru and South Africa face similar challenges. In the US, historical floods that have occurred in the past decade are too long to list. Worldwide, there are numerous places currently below sea level and, living there, staggering numbers of people living in areas that flood. Despite the global reach of rising waters, climate destruction is not meted out equally. The consequences of environmental catastrophes and the coronavirus crisis reveal underlying inequities and cruelties inherent in the world’s social, political, and economic systems.

For this reason, Sunde has created durational performances across the globe. While the waters that rise in the Bay of Bengal (2017) may seem the same as those in the San Francisco Bay (2014), North Sea, The Netherlands (2015), or the Bay of All Saints, Brazil (2019), what they divulge about each place is different. The impact of climate change, of rising waters and environmental destruction, falls harder on communities and people already under the greatest strain, those impacted by triumphalist capitalism, totalitarian regimes, and tragic historical legacies.

One element that stands out is the long timeframe of the work, too long for almost anyone to sit through in its entirety. Before March 2020, speed was our currency and looking with care seemed an extravagance. Works of art had become virtual QR codes for viewers to scan, register, and move on. Sunde’s 12 to 13 hour performances and videos slow down time, an experience that is central to the work. Viewers could scan the video, observe a woman waist or neck deep in water, somewhere, and move on. But this would be an abbreviation and antithesis of an experience, as is the transactional idea that one might “get” something from an encounter. By letting the work sink in and transform, we are changed. To resist the ability to capture a thing in its totality through durational performance is one way of pushing back the oppressive hegemony of commodity culture.

“36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea” is a work whose simplicity is its strength. A woman walks into the sea, at low tide, standing silently as the waters rise. It is the quiet that resists the noise, a body engaging with the elements, a person and a community creating a call to action.

—Keith Miller, Curator

Performing with The Sea: North Sea, Bay of Bengal, Bay of All Saints, Bodo Inlet will be projections of four works in the gallery, which can be viewed live from the safe social distance of the sidewalk or via the gallery website.

On September 5th there will be a livestream with the artist from Hallet’s Cove, New York, accompanied by reports from Maine, Mexico, San Francisco, Netherlands, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, and Aotearoa. As part of that virtual event, there will be a panel discussion with international collaborators from around the world, moderated by Una Chaudhuri and the artist and a panel with NYU faculty (Una Chaudhuri, Lori Cole, Elaine Gan, Nadja Millner-Larsen, Robin Nagle, Mauricio Salgado, Sonia Werner) and students.

There will also be two conversations with the artist during the installation. Gallatin Professor Eugenia Kisin will discuss the anthropocene, water, kinship and art. Gallatin Professor Kristin Horton will look at art, activism and the limits and liberation of theater and performance.