Part of the 23 Days at Sea residency, British video and performance artist Rebecca Moss left Vancouver on August 23 in a Hanjin freighter, expecting to dock in Shanghai on September 15. Run by Vancouver's Access Gallery, the residency focuses on issues of globalization, but what ended up happening during Moss's residency, while on-theme, wasn't exactly its goal.
On August 31, with debts amounting to $900 million, Hanjin Shipping Company filed for bankruptcy. Now placed in a receivership, meaning "in the custodial responsibility for the property of others, including tangible and intangible assets and rights", Hanjin was refused entry by Shanghai. It's now stuck in aquatic limbo off the coast of Japan, looking for a place that will allow it to dock. The shipping company is the seventh-largest in the world, accounting for 7% of container trade between North America and East Asia.
In an email to Access Gallery, Moss wrote: “I can’t begin to describe how it feels to look out the window and see a huge stack of containers, surrounded by miles of ocean in every direction, and realize they don’t actually have a destination... All the labour, the scale of this operation, just feels even more completely insane now.” In a Sept. 2 interview with the Vancouver Sun, Moss recounted that "pretty much everybody" in the crew had seen the bankruptcy coming.
Asked about how this change of plans might affect her work produced during the residency, Moss said: "the scope of them becomes much richer within this new context of a completely futile and pointless journey."
2 Comments
She had a futile premise to begin with. The ships getting stranded probably gives a bit more meaning to her "art"
Asked how this change of plans might affect her work, Moss said: "the scope of them becomes much richer within this new context of a completely futile and pointless journey." Then she said: "Does anyone have toilet paper?"
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