Hydrarchy: Power and Resistance at Sea Gasworks Gallery Until 7.11.

10 Paul McCarthy, Goldin+Senneby, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Melanie Jackson, Uriel Orlow, Femmy Otten, Laura Horelli, Anja Kirshner and David Panos, Joao Pedro Vale, Mathieu K. Abonnenc Curated by Anna Colin and Mia Jamkowicz, Hydrarchy: Power and Resistance at Sea works to interrogate uncertain and often disputed cultural, economic and political precincts. Spanning the sixteenth-century to the near-future, archival documentation to fictitious imaginings, Hydrarchy engages promiscuously with its given themes, taking as its principal reference the ship as a physical and abstract device with which to negotiate these territories. The ship is no more evident than in Melanie Jackons The Undesirables (2007), which is rooted in the th th st dioramas of the 18 and 19 century and here used to explicate a 21 century narrative. Pop up figurines mob a paper landscape, its model hills and beaches constructed from black and white drawings. Projectors crowd the edges of this sprawling miniaturization, lighting up cars with animated fires, while an upturned ship spills matchbox sized containers to the floor. Jacksons minutely detailed scene allegorizes the wreaking of the MSC Napoli off Branscombe beach in 2007. As the media announced beached bounty as common property, motorbikes, shampoo and trainers were misappropriated in a contemporary sacking, to general hostility from the authorities and conservative commentators. The Undesirables DIY construction - drawn templates of people and vehicles waiting at the side-lines of the installation to be cut out and activated - invites reenactment and play, pitting the resourceful looters against waiting police. Yet Jackson does not offer linear, exhaustive illustration but an anecdotal rendering, which captures the narratives resonance and allows her to circumvent authoritative reportage modes. In her laborious reconstruction, Jackson appears as an artist making to make sense. Joao Pedro Vales Of the Monstrous and Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales (2009) takes the maritime folklore of Moby Dick as its point of genesis. Presenting scientific renderings alongside quixotic images of encounters with the whale, Vales idiosyncratic collection recalls wunderkammer ; amateur museums both eclectic and disparate in their design, typified by the accumulation and juxtaposition of artificial and natural curiosities. As curiosity cabinets sought to make sense of the world by collecting its extremities, Vales miscellany considers how outlying mythologies can shape representations of identity within collective histories. The collection of curiosities was enabled by exploration and its returning objects, accompanied by fantastic naval anecdotage, were classified in hybrid terms. Similarly, many of Hydrarchys works inhabit the spaces between history and myth, fact and fiction. The sea is posited as unknown, undocumented territory, an often romanticised frontier. Mathieu K. Abonnencs projection, The Middle Passage (2006), refers to slave trade across the Atlantic. By reconstructing the story via a collage of Hollywood film clips, devoid of explicit imagery of the colonised figure, The Middle Passage seems to discuss both the exploitation and the romanticisation of the exotic, non-Western Other. The exhibition often delineates the ship as a conduit of social or economic power. However, Hydrarchys interrogations into the mechanisms of resistance which arise in retaliation are evinced in Anja Kirshner and David Panoss Polly II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands (2006). Speculating on a fictional future, London is flooded leaving a skyline of JG Ballards imagining. The dispossessed untermensch of the East End, made up of dreamers, crusaders, pirates and prostitutes hypothesise a self-policing, morally ambiguous revolution. They represent an alternative those who cling among the floods to civilised economic systems, caustically referenced in the film as West End waterside living.

Hydrarchy asks us to engage with peripheral terrains. It suggests alternative strategies for traversal, in a space both lawless and poetic. While covering a myriad of terms - exploration, colonialism, political allegiance, representation - Hydrarchy successfully considers the sites at which these are brought into confrontation.