Submarines - Josphine Baker

Submarines brings together drawings by the artist Josephine Baker and texts by M. Ty, in a collaborative search through the underside of the sea.

Made during 2021–2022, Josephine Baker’s drawings are speculative immersions into the murky world of modern human interactions with the deep ocean. Their scenes disclose a realm where blame and culpability are continually shapeshifting: zoomorphic tools close in around conduit prey, infrastructural diagrams depict processes of connection and severance, and pools of light both capture and bleach out their slippery subjects.

In response to these drawings, M. Ty has composed a series of short studies, or sounding lines, that listen for the echoes of what has been submerged. If the sea is history, what, then, is its floor? Treading the open waters of this question, these writings awaken a portal of recall; and they confront the Janus face of the ocean bottom—as both the bed of colonial infrastructures of communication and the illegible archive of the drowned and scattered past.

Edition of 500
Published by Nir Altman
Designed by Till Gathmann
Softcover , 48 pages
32 x 24,5 cm