An international group exhibition which deals with the invisible economies linked to the sea. In their works, world-respected artists deal with unusual and radical phenomena, from strange online shops to the empires of amateur pornography and other golden coasts.
In the geographical sense, Europe is a maritime continent, and the sea has always fundamentally shaped its entire development: considering the ratio of the length of the coast to the total land surface, Europe has more contact with the sea than any other continent.
For Rijeka, the port, as well as the sea, is not only a place of the loading and unloading or the arrivals and departures of boats. The port is the heart of the city and symbolically important for the identity of the city. This is why the sea, and new forms of work and economy which are connected to the sea, are extremely important for both Rijeka and Europe. The exhibition The Sea Is Glowing looks at new invisible economies connected to the sea β in the ocean , like deep sea mining, at the sea shore, like offshore tax havens, and on the sea , like ultra-libertarian sea-steading start-ups.
All of these activities are part of new economies that involve new kinds of labour, like outsourced micro-work, global logistics, or new kinds of capital circulation, happening in places like freeports. Harbour cities like Rijeka are of particular interest for these kinds of economies because of their at times special taxation model.
The artists in the exhibition The Sea Is Glowing look at weird Amazon shops, externalized data-cleaning work, deep sea mining, rising sea levels, hidden offshore paradises, empires of amateur pornography and other lucrative shores. In short: A sea of labour. For his installation Unlock Life , Aram Bartholl retrieved a number of rental e-scooters and bikes from different canals of Berlin.
