SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Yerba Buena Center for the Arts announces the debut of the traveling exhibition The Ocean After Nature, on view June 17 through August 28, 2016. Curated by Alaina Claire Feldman and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, the exhibition explores the ocean as a site reflecting the ecological, cultural, political, and economic realities of a globalized world.

The Ocean After Nature features more than 20 works of art in a wide variety of media—including photography, video, sculpture, music, and design—that propose new representations of the ocean as a natural and human construct. The works explore the seascape as a means to identify and critique various interrelated and chaotic systems of power, for instance land-sea divides, the circulation of people and goods, and the vulnerabilities of our ecosystems. Invoking personal themes of identity and migration alongside more universal concerns related to tourism, trade, and the exploitation of natural resources, the internationally established and emerging artists in The Ocean After Nature reflect diverse and complex understandings of the ocean.

Participating artists at YBCA include: Ursula Biemann, CAMP, Yonatan Cohen and Rafi Segal, Mati Diop, Drexciya, Peter Fend, Manuel Gnam, Renée Green, Peter Hutton, Hyung S. Kim, An-My Lê, Manny Montelibano, Deimantas Narkevičius, The Otolith Group, Ulrike Ottinger, Maria D. Rapicavoli, Carissa Rodriguez, Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, Dimitra Skandali, Supersudaca, and UNITED BROTHERS.

At each hosting site of this traveling exhibition, a new work by a local artist is added to the presentation in order to contextualize it for its diverse global audiences. At YBCA, Assistant Curator Ceci Moss has invited the San Francisco–based artist Dimitra Skandali to present a site-responsive sculpture. Skandali grew up on Paros, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, and her ties to it, its history, and its people are central to her work. Themes of the past are reflected in Skandali’s choice of materials and the ethereal, ephemeral forms she creates.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue edited by Alaina Claire Feldman, published by ICI, and designed by Geoff Kaplan / General Working Group. It includes texts by Alaina Claire Feldman, Lucy Lippard, Allan Sekula and Noël Burch, Yonatan Cohen and Rafi Segal, Lanka Tattersall, Ursula Biemann, May Joseph, Amanda Parmer, Virgil Taylor, Kodwo Eshun, Negar Azimi, Ed Halter, Patrick Flores, CAMP, Övül O. Durmusoglu, Andrey Misiano, Sarah Wang, and María del Carmen Carrión, among others. The catalogue will be made available for sale at YBCA’s front desk.

After concluding its run at YBCA, The Ocean After Nature will next be presented at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide, Australia, in 2017.