# Keep your head above water: art show looks at the rising seas

One of the most striking things that will be on display at an exhibition in Norfolk this weekend is an oak chair. Ordinary enough, except that it is elevated high in the air. Why? Because this is where it will need to be in 2100, given rising sea levels in the Netherlands, where it was made by the artist Boris Maas.

Entitled The Urge to Sit Dry (2018), there is another like it in the office of the Dutch environment minister in The Hague, a constant reminder of the real and  by rising sea levels.



The chair is part of Can the Seas Survive Us?, which opens this weekend in the Sainsbury Centre, a Norwich art gallery and museum. The location is significant: Norfolk is one of the areas of the UK . Visitors will take a metaphorical dive into the murky complexities of an ecosystem we all know is at risk, but often find hard to decipher, still less to work out what we can do to change things.

“As with so many of the big, thorny questions around climate and the future of the planet, people don’t know where to start,” says Jago Cooper, director of the Sainsbury Centre.

“We can project people’s imaginations and realities to places and spaces they would never otherwise have access to – they can be transported to melting Arctic ice floes, to the Pacific hundreds of years ago, to underneath the sea today.”

The exhibition consists of three separate shows. The first is , held in a series of underground galleries painted, Rothko-like, in a shade of baby blue on top (to symbolise the sea we swim in) and a deep, marine green below (symbolising the vast, hidden sea).



The Dutch artist Boris Maas with his 2018 work The Urge to Sit Dry, which uses wooden blocks to lift the chair to the height it needs to be to sit above predicted sea levels

Many of the artists in this show – put together by John Kenneth Paranada, the Sainsbury Centre’s curator of art and climate change – are Dutch, underlining the impact the climate crisis has had and will continue to have on the work of those artists who feel the threat most keenly.

In one wonderful textile piece, Radical Furniture for Radical Times (2019) by Koen Taselaar, octopuses – a species known for their intelligence and adaptability – seem to have taken over and now live in an underwater house with brightly painted staircases, dressing tables and lamps, and a sofa on which a couple of them are comfortably sprawling.

And British artists are also responding to the climate emergency: both Maggi Hambling and Claire Cansick, whose work is in the show, have been clear about their concern over climate change and its impact on their painting.







The show explores the , which 7,000 years ago connected what are now Norfolk and the Netherlands. It would have been possible to walk from one to the other, encountering mammoths, bears and woolly rhinoceroses along the way.

The Strangers Case (In The Age Of Meltdown), a film made last year by Nabuurs&VanDoorn, imagines this prehistoric land lost to the rising sea, prompting the realisation that this is the same fate now facing Pacific nations such as the Cook Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati.



As part of the preparation for Can The Seas Survive Us?, Parananda took a group of artists, curators and academics on a 36-hour voyage across the North Sea from Yarmouth to Rotterdam onboard a 24-metre (77ft) fishing smack built in Lowestoft in 1921.

The other two components of the show alongside A World of Water are , in which Yuki Kihara explores Charles Darwin’s manipulation of his findings on non-heteronormative species and same-sex attraction in animals to suggest they were rare and unnatural; and , which explores what it feels like to live underwater.

“What we want to do overall is bring the oceans closer to home,” says Parananda. “Because water and the sea connect all of us, wherever and whoever we are.”

_Can The Seas Survive Us?_ _is made up of three overlapping exhibitions:_ _A World of Water and Darwin in Paradise Camp, which run_ _15 March – 3 August_ _and_ _Sea Inside,_ _7 June – 26 October_
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