Abyssal Seeker (Demersal Zone), 2021

2 channel HD video with sound 7:41 mins

Courtesy the artist and Seventeen, London
Presentation at the 23rd Biennale of Sydney was made possible with generous support from the UK/Australia Season Patrons Board, the British Council and the Australian Government as part of the UK/Australia Season

Marine lifeforms of all shapes and sizes twist and turn in Joey Holder’s immersive video work Abyssal Seeker (2021), which presents us with a scene from the depths of the ocean. Humans cannot travel to these depths without the use of a drone. Deep sea environments like these represent the limits of human knowledge, and our endeavour to know everything about the world we live in.  

The strange creatures in this video do their best to evade the searching light of the drone, which seeks to make visible and identify their forms. Light and darkness come to visually represent that which we know and don’t know, reminding us of periods from human history like the Age of Enlightenment, in which having some knowledge of something became closely tied to its control. Abyssal Seeker reflects this idea as it occurs in our relationship with nature, looking to the behaviours and qualities of life forms from the edges of the natural world as inspiration for ways in which we might ourselves be able to evade identification.   

Holder’s marine lifeforms ensure invisibility from the extractive gaze of humans through change. Above water their life is reduced to a bundle of biological resources whose value can be quantified and patented. As a way to avoid becoming more fodder for biocapital, the lifeforms in Abyssal Seeker migrate to the blind spots of our scopic regime and finds themselves at the edges of habitable space. – Theo Reeves-Evison 

Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney with generous assistance from the UK/Australia Season Patrons Board, the British Council and the Australian Government as part of the UK/Australia Season