Submarines

Submarines' brings together drawings by the artist Josephine Baker and texts by M. Ty, in a collaborative search through the underside of the sea.

Made during 2021–2022, Josephine Baker’s drawings are speculative immersions into the murky world of modern human interactions with the deep ocean. Their scenes disclose a realm where blame and culpability are continually shapeshifting: zoomorphic tools close in around conduit prey, infrastructural diagrams depict processes of connection and severance, and pools of light both capture and bleach out their slippery subjects.

In response to these drawings, M. Ty has composed a series of short studies, or sounding lines, that listen for the echoes of what has been submerged. If the sea is history, what, then, is its floor? Treading the open waters of this question, these writings awaken a portal of recall; and they confront the Janus face of the ocean bottom—as both the bed of colonial infrastructures of communication and the illegible archive of the drowned and scattered past.

Josephine Baker (b. 1990, London, UK) is a London-based visual artist working through sculpture, installation and drawing. She completed her undergraduate at Central Saint Martins in London in 2012, and her postgraduate in 2017 from the Royal Academy Schools, London. Her recent exhibitions include: Frieze London Focus Section with Nir Altman, 2022; Outfallers, Nir Altman, Munich, 2022 (solo); Drawing Attention: emerging British artists, British Museum, London, 2022; Clear out the wounds closest to the sun, V.O Curations, London, 2021 (solo); Wallwerk, Nir Altman, Munich, 2021; Drawing Room Biennial, London, 2021; The Land Lies, ChertLüdde BUNGALOW, Berlin, 2020 (solo).

M. Ty is an ember of a diaspora.