Marina Zurkow Winter/Spring 2016 Projects

SOLO SHOW AT BITFORMS GALLERY FEB 14, 2016

New work at bitforms gallery
Opening: Sunday Feb 14 from 4-7 pm
with Harmonized System Code emcee Kalliopi Mathios
Runs through April 3, 2016
bitforms gallery  |  131 Allen Street  New York, NY 10002
 

MORE&MORE (the invisible oceans) is an art and research project that explores the language and mechanics of global trade, container shipping, and the exchange of goods, questioning a mercantile structure that by necessity disallows the presence of ocean as a real space in order to flatten the world into a Pangaea of capital.

Maritime shipping is a leviathan - opaque and illegible to the non-expert, a system of codes and loopholes in which no person has a picture of the entirety. The studio, initially driven by an impulse to picture global, local and maritime spaces, spent a year looking for legal and illegal data sources, getting a rudimentary grasp on trade, visiting the Port of NY/NJ, and digging away at the astounding scale and mechanics of maritime shipping. We found patterns, literally, as we navigated this “black box” of containerization.

The tunnel into this world lay in our discovery of the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS Code), the internationally accepted standard of product classification, which codifies the way nations conduct import/export. All legal trade products (and illegal ones that find loopholes) are shipped using this system. The studio translated this code to use throughout our own expressive system, scraping data and transforming it into icons and sculptures. 

 This claustrophobic fire-wall of HS Code generated the works that make up this first installment of MORE&MORE: hypnotic, generative animations of eight port nations’ cultural and product identities; a kiosk of top export items sculpted in fungus, chocolate, soap; unique bathing suits visualizing import/export data, a commerce web site, and the HS Code rendered as wallpaper.

In collaboration with

Sarah Rothberg & Surya Mattu

moreandmore.world website:Neil Cline

 MORE&MORE animation code: Sam Brenner

 MORE&MORE fabrication: Parallel Development

 Code and craft: Stefani Bardin, Xuedi Chen, Ariana Martinez, Hannah Mishin, Justin Peake, Abigail Simon

Research/guidance: Margaret Smith, Eric Rosenthal

Big thanks to: Borusan Contemporary, punctum books, The Observatory of Economic Complexity, The Atlas of Economic Complexity

MORE&MORE.WORLD WEB SITE

Sarah Rothberg, Surya Mattu and I will be launching the website moreandmore.world by Valentine's Day! You will be able to find out all about your most-desired products' shipping container travel companions, and custom design your own swimsuit.

image from MORE&MORE.WORLD, 2016

TWO NEW BOOKS PUBLISHED BY PUNCTUM

Two books have been published by punctum books, in conjunction with the exhibition:
 
More&More (the invisible oceans), an exhibition catalogue and conversation with curator Kathleen Forde; and  A Guide to the Harmonized System, with contributions by Stacy Alaimo, Heather Davis, Kathleen Forde, Dylan Gauthier, Elena Glasberg, Kalliopi Mathios, Steve Mentz, Astrida Neimanis, Chris Piuma, Elspeth Probyn, Sarah Rothberg, Phil Steinberg, and Rita Wong.

Book design: Rebecca Lieberman and Chris Piuma

Editor: Chris Piuma

For more info or to purchase:

RESEARCHING JELLYFISH + CLIMATE CHAOS

Mar 6 – April 4
I’ll be in residence at Rice University’s CENHS, researching the Gulf of Mexico, especially looking at jellyfish, and particularly ways to healthily harvest and regularly eat jellyfish. Inspiring souls on Rice faculty include: Joseph Campana, Dominic Boyer and Timothy Morton. 
 
Dear Climate (Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer, Marina Zurkow) will be featured on the  Rice campus as part of the FotoFest 2016 Biennial, opening March 12, 2016

If you have suggestions for chefs, adventurous caterers, jellyfish fishermen , or shipping channel connections, please write to me!

images below from DEARCLIMATE.NET, 2014
 

SIGNAL SPECIES FOR MINNESOTA'S CHANGING CLIMATE

April 2016 – June 2017
Northern Lights.mn has received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Art Works grant for Making the Best of It: The North, a large scale food project to be presented at Northern Spark 2016/17, in collaboration with geographer Valentine Cadieux and architect/artist Aaron Marx. Making the Best of It is an umbrella concept for a series of regionally site-specific pop up food shacks and community dinners that feature a climate-change enabled (and often unwanted) edible indicator species, in order to engage the public in tastings and conversation about the risks of climate chaos, our business-as-usual food system, and the short term food innovations at our disposal.


image from FUTURE TOPOPHAGIES, EATING TOMORROW'S ECOSYSTEMS workshop, Minneapolis, 2014