Artist stranded in residency on board undockable container ship

Artist Rebecca Moss, the current resident artist of Access Gallery’s Twenty-Three Days at Sea “travelling artist residency”, is stranded on board a container ship a few hundred kilometres off the coast of Japan.

The ship, the Hanjin Geneva, is part of a fleet of 150 container ships owned by the Hanjin Shipping Company, whose vessels have been denied entry to the port of Shanghai after the company filed for receivership and its assets were frozen.

Twenty-Three Days At Sea is “a highly unconventional artist residency, offering selected emergent and experimental artists passage aboard cargo ships sailing from Vancouver to Shanghai.”

According to Access Gallery, who in their press release blame events on a decline in worldwide trade and overcapacity in global shipping, this is an example of “both the precarity of globalized capitalism and our dependence on systems that we neither see nor understand.”

The work of Moss, the residency’s fifth artist, explores “theories of the comedic, wherein comedy is understood to arise in moments of friction between a mechanical system and the nature into which it is inserted.”

Moss said in an email, “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.”

(Source: Access Gallery)