OrtaWater—Antarctica

Lucy and Jorge Orta’s collaborative practice in painting, sculpture, photography, and video has, for several decades, addressed universal concerns of shelter, sustainable development, and migration. Reflecting their respective training, the couple’s work incorporates elements of fashion, art, and architecture.This wall-mounted sculptural piece includes a miniature boat, oars, sleeping bags, and water bottles. It also incorporates photographs—the only such ones in all of how the light gets in—of refugees with their belongings in bags and suitcases, boarding boats or waiting at the water’s edge. It is a piece that grew out of the artists’ most ambitious project to date: Antarctic Village—No Borders, which was commissioned by the first edition of the “Biennial of the End of the World” and took place in Antarctica in 2007. Part of an effort to amend Article XIII of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this body of work reflects the Ortas’ utopian idea of a world without borders, in which “everyone has the right to move freely and cross frontiers to their chosen territory,” according to their statement. “No individual should have an inferior status to that of capital, trade, telecommunications, or pollution that traverse all borders.” (“how the light gets in”, curated by Andrea Inselmann and presented at the Johnson Museum September 7-December 8, 2019)