A World of Water

The Sainsbury Centre’s new ‘season’, ‘Can the Seas Survive Us?’, consists of a six-month-long programme of linked exhibitions focusing on the relationship between humans and water. The first show brings together a varied body of work, including medieval maps, several 17th-century Dutch landscapes loaned from the Fitzwilliam Museum, a 19th-century Polynesian wood carving of a ‘fisherman’s god’, a design for a swim cap by the 20th-century designer Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld, and contemporary paintings, photographs and installations by Olafur Eliasson, Boris Maas, Maggi Hambling and others, many of which meditate on how climate change and human-made pollution is affecting our oceans (15 March–3 August). The exhibition aims to show how humans throughout time have conceived of water in wildly different ways and argues that preserving our ecosystems is now more vital than ever before.

Preview below | View Apollo’s Art Diary
Find out more from the Sainsbury Centre’s website

Wooden Male Figure (‘Fishermen’s god’) (1775–1825), Polynesia. Photo: © Sainsbury Centre

Wall of Water VIII (2011), Maggi Hambling. © the artist

Design drawing swim cap no. 4 (1932), Hendricus Theodorus Wijdeveld. © Collection Nieuwe Instituut/WIJD

View of Scheveningen Sands (c. 1641), Hendrick van Anthonissen. Photo: © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge