Join us for an afternoon of conversations with artists and special screenings around the ‘At the Edge of Land’ group exhibition. Artists and researchers will come together to discuss trade and shipping infrastructure, with an emphasis on seafaring and connectivities across the Gulf and the Indian Ocean.
Guest speakers include artists Köken Ergun, Ranjit Kandalgaonkar, Joar Songcuya and professor of Gulf Studies Laleh Khalili.
Special screening of From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2013) by CAMP.  

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11 am (Optional)
An exhibition walkthrough of ‘At the Edge of Land’ with curator Lucas Morin

2 p.m.
Keynote Presentation: Laleh Khalili

Author Laleh Khalili will reflect on her recent books, Sinews of War and Trade (Verso, 2020) and The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books, 2024), which examine the place of shipping and seafarers in global systems of trade and power.  

3:15 p.m.
Screening: Köken Ergun, China Beijing I Love You, 2023 (34’)
Followed by a Q&A with the artist. 

China, Beijing, I Love You! is an animated film about the extraction of nickel and cobalt along China’s Maritime Silk Road. The film focuses on the character of Nickel Dust, who is exiled from her home on Sulawesi Island due to nickel excavations. On the other side of the world, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, cobalt is being extracted by artisanal miners. Both nickel and cobalt are the main components of batteries used in Electric Vehicle(EV) and mobile phones. Giving agency to the extracted minerals and making them the story’s protagonists, the film investigates the geo-political, social and environmental consequences of ambitions for global expansion.

The film is made in collaboration with Danu Fitra.

4:30 p.m.
Tea break 

5:00 p.m.
In Conversation: Ranjit Kandalgaonkar and Joar Songcuya
Moderated by Laleh Khalili

This conversation brings together artists Ranjit Kandalgaonkar and Joar Songcuya, both featured in ‘At the Edge of Land’. Both artists incorporate shipping into their work and have personal connections to the industry. Kandalgaonkar’s father was a merchant navy captain, and the artist dedicated a significant body of work to the shipbreaking industry after researching the fate of his father’s ship. Songcuya, on the other hand, was trained as a marine engineer and spent ten years working at sea before pursuing his artistic career.

6:30 p.m.
Screening – CAMP, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, 2013 (80’) 

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (2013) was produced by CAMP, a cross-disciplinary artist collective based in Mumbai, in collaboration with sailors from the Kutch district in western India. With giant wooden vessels as the main characters and the medium, the feature documentary portrays the transportation of break-bulk goods, the construction of ships, boats navigating choppy waters, sea life, and the industrial landscapes of port cities on the coasts of the gulfs of the Arabian Sea, with Dubai and Sharjah serving as seasonal hubs.

The film combines footage already circulating among sailors, including single-take videos filmed from one boat to another, set to Bollywood songs and religious tracks, often shared at sea via Bluetooth, and footage filmed over a four-year collaboration between CAMP and the sailors, and challenges traditional documentary methods. It offers an intimate portrayal of a vital form of sea trade and the often unseen labour involved in global maritime trade networks in the Western Indian Ocean.

About the speakers

Köken Ergun is an artist/filmmaker from Turkey with a background in performing arts. After working with American theatre director Robert Wilson, Ergun became involved with video art and film. His films often deal with communities not known to a greater public and the importance of ritual in such groups. Ergun usually spends a long time with his subjects before starting to shoot and engages in a long research period for his projects. He also collaborates with ethnographers, historians and sociologists as extensions to his artistic practice. Since 2020, following the Covid-19 pandemic, Ergun has changed his practice by pausing to make films by himself and getting more involved in collaborations with other artists to make installations, fiction and animation films. 

Ranjit Kandalgaonkar lives and works in Mumbai and his art practice primarily comprises a lens directed at the urban context of cities. Projects such as ‘cityinflux’, ‘Gentricity’ and ‘Stories of Philanthropic Trusts’ map vulnerability within redevelopment strategies of urbanisation or record timelines and ‘blindspots’ – alternate markers of a city that’s unravelling. A study of combative histories of reclamation and speculation has led to projects such as ‘Isles amidst reclamation’ and ‘7 Isles unclaimed’. Most of his long-term projects are research-intensive and attempt to unlock historical and contemporary data by placing the work in the context of an unseen social history. Another decade-long project named ‘Modelled Recycled Systems’ records ship-breaking practices and maps invisible shipping infrastructures.

Laleh Khalili is the Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter in Britain. She is the author or editor of seven books, including most recently Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020), The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (Mack Books, 2024) and Extractive Capitalism: Commodities, Corporations and Corruption in the Global Economy (Profile Books, forthcoming).

Joar Songcuya is a Filipino self-taught painter, marine engineer and seafarer. He has been sailing the world for over a decade as a marine engineer onboard commercial ships and has travelled to over 50 countries and 86 international shipping ports and terminals worldwide. He has done solo painting exhibitions in Manila around his life at sea. His ongoing research, The Seamanship Project, based on the lives of Filipino sea-based migrant workers, was supported by the NoExit Grant Para Site Hong Kong. He is interested in water and statelessness, oceanography, marine engineering, and sea-based labour, which are issues pertinent to his homeland, the Philippines, a maritime country. 

Image credit: CAMP, From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf (film still), 2013. Courtesy of the artists.