Bringing together contemporary art, historical works, and scientific inquiry through three concurrent exhibitions, the Sainsbury Centre has launched its 2025 exhibition programme with an ambitious and urgent theme: Can the Seas Survive Us? As sea levels rise and ocean ecosystems collapse, the exhibition series is framed within the context of climate change, overfishing, and environmental degradation to offer a provocative exploration of how humanity’s relationship with the ocean can evolve in the face of such crisis.



The three exhibitions run from March until October 2025, touching on themes of fluidity, colonialism, sustainable energy, and the transformative potential of the ocean as a resource. Central to these exhibitions is a recognition that small island nations – like the Maldives and Kiribati – as well as coastal communities in places like the venue’s home-county, Norfolk, are already experiencing first-hand the destructive impact of climate change.

A nation hyper-sensitive to the impact of climate change on our coastal landscape is the Netherlands, and it features prominently in the series’ opening exhibition, A World of Water, a rich, multifaceted exhibition that spans centuries of artistic responses to marine life. It opens with a standout work by Dutch artist Boris Maas, entitled The Urge to Sit Dry – precariously balanced on four spindly legs, an oak chair sits high in the air, elevated to the level of rising sea levels in the Netherlands by 2100. A twin of the work sits inside the Dutch environment minister’s office in the Hague as a constant reminder of the urgent threat of rising sea levels.



Centring around the North Sea, the exhibition traces Norfolk’s historic ties with the Netherlands and the pre-historic landmass Doggerland that once physically connected these landscapes, before expanding to showcase global perspectives on marine ecosystems. Spanning several centuries, the exhibition showcases works by notable artists such as Eva Rothschild, Olafur Eliasson, and Julian Charrière, offering a deep dive into the ways artists have engaged with the ocean – both as a subject of beauty and a site of exploitation.

A curiosity is the 1641 landscape, View of Scheveningen Sands, by Hendrick van Anthonissen, a painting which sparked attention ten years ago when a previously hidden beached whale was uncovered by conservators at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Framed within a wider collection of 17th century Dutch Golden Age works, a relationship is traced between the Dutch Masters and East Anglia – the works inspiring the Norwich School of the 19th century where artists such as John Crome and Robert Ladbrooke adopted Dutch techniques to capture the region’s unique coastal landscape. The discovery of the beached whale in Anthonissen’s – hidden for over two centuries – transformed a formerly tranquil waterfront vista into a dramatic beach scene. Revealing changes in taste that resulted in a previous owner crudely altering the work over two-hundred years ago, the work chimes with a driving curatorial position within the exhibition – the ocean unmasked as not simply a backdrop for human experience, but a space deeply affected by our actions.


 
Concurrently opening as the second exhibition within the season’s trilogy is Darwin in Paradise Camp by Yuki Kihara – undoubtedly the standout exhibition. First presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale the Sāmoan-Japanese interdisciplinary artist brings a queer perspective to the discussion of colonial narratives and the human connection to the sea. Kihara up-cycles the works of French painter Paul Gauguin, reinterpreting images of Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands through the lens of Sāmoan identity and the Fa'afafine community, a third-gender group to which Kihara belongs.



A highlight within the work is Darwin Drag, a new video work commissioned for the Sainsbury Centre’s presentation, that reimagines Charles Darwin's work on evolutionary biology. Housed in a traditional Sāmoan structure, the video piece follows Kihara in conversation with Darwin, who is separated from his Victorian values through transformation into a drag queen. Freed from society’s shackles, the work reveals the supressed knowledge of queer species and same-sex attraction in the animal kingdom, focusing on fish species from the Sāmoan archipelago such as clownfish and parrotfish, both of which exhibit Fa'afafine-like traits.

Betweeen-ness is a key concept within Kihara’s work, most evident in their “Vārchive” – an original concept coined by the artist that continues to grow through their research-led practice. Adopting the Sāmoan word “Va” to describe a space between things that connect by crossing boundaries of time and space, the exchange established through the situated between-ness offers critical space for reflection of both how knowledge of our oceans has been constructed, and how these systems continue to shape the communities most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change within coastal communities.

 

The curation of this trilogy of exhibitions follows a new programmatic strategy of the Sainsbury Centre to curate seasonally, each series interrogating a broad, and often complex question. Previous seasons asked Why Do We Take Drugs? and What Is Truth?, with this year’s autumn exhibition going to raise the question Can We Stop Killing Each Other?

The final exhibition in this series, Sea Inside, will open on the 07 June, overlapping with both the curent exhibitions. Exploring the emotional and psychological aspects of the ocean, it will showcase works that uses the sea as a metaphor for human experience. Through casting a critical eye on the 70% of our planet that is the seascape, this first question asked of the new curatorial approach, Can the Seas Survive Us? is addressed in many ways. Art perhaps can’t provide answers to questions, but it can – as this series of exhibitions does – take us beyond the scientific and into the cultural. Here, through exploring the ocean’s role in sustaining life on Earth and humanity’s responsibility for its protection, questions are asked that go beyond the local context of East Anglia into shared experiences that may help us towards an understanding from which answers could arrive.