The Sainsbury Centre presents Sea Inside, an exhibition exploring humanity’s interconnections, interrelationships, and immersion in oceans.

The exhibition features contemporary artworks across a range of media by renowned international artists including Shuvinai Ashoona, Marcus Coates, Evan Ifekoya, Laure Prouvost and Hiroshi Sugimoto, and includes new work by Tyler Eash, Chioma Ebinama and Harun Morrison, as well as a new commission by Gabriella Hirst.

Curated by Dr Sarah Wade and Dr Pandora Syperek, Sea Inside turns our gaze from the vast expanse of the open sea towards its more intimate spaces – whether physical, psychological or imaginary – and dives into shared watery origins, Indigenous ways of life, and the items we remove from the sea to display on land.

The exhibition’s immersive focus brings to light many human-ocean connections, developing a set of ambitious, central themes. Expressions of marine interiority are explored and critiqued in installations, sculpture, video, sound and works on paper. What surfaces is a relational oceanic model, suggesting a necessary ethos for times of planetary crisis.

The exhibition reflects on humanity’s intimate relationships with the oceans, and how these have been processed intellectually, emotionally, and creatively.

While some humans have pursued life on or under water – through seafaring, research, fishing or diving – others have, and still are, subjected to the horrors of forced or desperate maritime crossings. Yet, the sea has often been viewed as a mysterious ‘other,’ with its expansive surface and seemingly infinite depths dominating marine imagery in the history of Western art. Conversely, artworks in this exhibition explore the ways the oceans have been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale, and brought inside to be tamed, contained, or better understood.

Sea Inside is the third of three concurrent exhibitions – A World of Water, Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara and Sea Inside – in a programme centred around the fundamental question Can the Seas Survive Us?.