Annie Dell’Aria in “Ocean Meditation”

ON SIX CINEMA SCREENS, divers wearing goggles, flippers and oxygen tanks kneel on the ocean floor or hover cross-legged just above. In the popular imagination, aquanauts in diving gear are adventurers, modern explorers of the planet’s last frontier in the spirit of Jacques Cousteau. But in MO Turtle Grass Meadow, 2023, a six-channel video installation currently on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, they are disturbingly inactive, more interested in contemplation than discovery. Captured in static long shots, the breath of the divers bubbles up to the surface in a hypnotic rhythm; their bodies sway gently with the thrust of the water; their hair moves with the seagrass. Sometimes we only see fish and underwater flora in attentive close-up, moving with the same gentle flow. A tonal score produced by isolating and looping notes sung by human voices gives a melodic outline to the diegetic sounds of gurgling water, crackling coral, mechanical regulators and human breath emanating from each screen. Teal circular throw pillows and gray carpet invite viewers to linger. Once seated, their breathing slows and subconsciously mimics the swaying of underwater life forms; screens extend from the ground and carry them to the bottom of the ocean. From a loudspeaker mounted on the wall, a soft voice intones: “Orient yourself to the present moment, focusing on your place in this world. . . breathe and bring awareness to the body. A displayed QR code leads to eight other meditation scripts, available as sound or text, which discuss marine biology, ocean minerals, speculative futures and creation myths.

The Wexner exhibition, “Meditation Ocean,” curated by Jennifer Lange, is the first production of an ongoing project conceived and directed by Hope Ginsburg and credited to the Meditation Ocean Constellation, an evolving collaboration of artists, musicians (the score is by Joshua Quarles), divers, poets, writers, filmmakers, scientists and others. Ginsburg has explored underwater ecologies and mindfulness through collaborative art practice for years. Land dive team2014-2020, a series of land and amphibious meditations and performances staged in places like the Bay of Fundy and a sebkha (salt) in Qatar, stems from the disturbing image of people in wetsuits breathing from oxygen tanks on earth and developed into a collaborative and heartfelt form of meditation.

In October 2021, members of the constellation traveled to Alina’s Reef in Biscayne National Park in Florida for a four-day shoot. The eight-person dive team included Ginsburg, cinematographer Matt Flowers, professional divers and members of Diving with a Purpose, a maritime archeology organization that preserves and interprets submerged heritage, with a focus on on the African Diaspora. On screen, these adventurers stop their quest for the wreckage of the Guerrero– a Spanish ship that sank off the coast of Florida in 1827, drowning forty-one of the hundreds of slaves on board – and instead are simply co-present with this tragic story, each other, and the many species that inhabit water. Texts commissioned by poet Anaïs Duplan and researcher Melody Jue contextualize and theorize the aquatic milieu of the project, complementing the multidisciplinary meditation scenarios and mindfulness programming coinciding with the exhibition. The collaborators tap into many different types of expertise and knowledge, but the installation does not overwhelm the viewer with data and research, rewarding both the casual viewer and the engaged reader who follows the deep dives of the project. Skillfully edited by Alexis McCrimmon, the multiple channels blend subtly through the use of blurry frames called “flickers”, which smooth the cuts between five- to ten-minute dive sequences, and an arrangement of screens that creates a triptych panoramic arch on one gallery wall and a more architectural configuration on another. The experience is both shared and personal (what media theorist Giuliana Bruno calls “public intimacy”), transporting and grounded. Sound and image immerse the viewer in an underwater coastal meadow but also remind them of their earthly body through prompts for meditation and the strangeness of the bubbling and mechanically assisted breathing of divers.

Some critics of contemporary art place immersive video and social practice at opposite ends of a spectrum of viewer activation – one passive and spectacular, the other participatory and disqualified. MO Turtle Grass Meadow challenges such patterns by incorporating high production values ​​and cinematic enchantment into a broad, educational and participatory project that views urgent crises through the prism of what might be called pneumatic politics. From protest chants of “I can’t breathe” that recall racist police killings to debates over masking and public accountability to wildfire ashes that have become a new form of time, the last three years have amplified how our access to air is neither mundane nor universal. Amid our doomscrolling, reminders to stop and breathe have been turned into commodities by mindfulness apps and a self-help culture and cinematic pleasures presented as mere escapism. Against such tendencies, Meditation Ocean Constellation’s lush, meditative filmmaking and interplay of inquiry and reflection solicit a soothing pause, one that is structured not by the logic of walling off the world but by the potential to find means to be aware, co-present, and floating within it.

“Meditation Ocean” is on view through July 9 at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio.

Annie Dell’Aria is an associate professor of art history at the University of Miami in Oxford, Ohio, and the author of The Moving Image as Public Art: Sidewalk Spectators and Modes of Enchantment (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).