Aquaria – Or the Illusion of a Boxed Sea exhibition booklet

Aquaria – Or the Illusion of a Boxed Sea was an exhibition at maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology curated by Angela Rui that looked at

how the ocean has washed up inside our cities, homes and cultural institutions, and questions how we have interiorised the notion of an ocean kingdom.

Invented in the Victorian age, the aquarium as object embodies the nature/culture divide, and continues to constitute an ocean diorama, a self-contained world and a techno-natural assemblage, home to a living collection mirroring our own personal yet fictional marine world.

After months confined to our homes, we too have metaphorically floated around isolated techno-tanks of our own making: our fishbowl existence now begs comparison with the artificial aquatic dimension, once more questioning our terracentric relationship with the oceansphere.

Hence, the aquarium – whether the domestic object or the public venue – is viewed as the conceptual element that allows us to lay bare the hierarchical mechanisms that have underpinned our culture of living outside of nature: how should we intervene in this world-making process that occurs when our vision becomes limited by what we see? […]

Aquaria’s visual identity was designed by studio òbelo and it aims to unsettle the viewer’s gaze by generating a self-reflective awareness of the ambiguities of perception. The aquarium is conceptualized as a series of impossible shapes based on the Necker Cube (1832).