MARINA ZURKOW
Digital graphic
In collaboration with Sarah Rothberg
Commissioned by CEAP
CEAP commissioned Zurkow and Rothberg to create a primary, scalable illustrative identity for the Center, who “conducts, supports, and disseminates research that contributes to the protection of both animals and the environment.”
Food, performance, props, slide show
In collaboration with Hank and Bean
Supported by Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES), UCLA, led by Allison Carruth
A dinner and movable feast exploring the edible desertification of the Los Angeles region, one whose contemporary culture still holds dear the sensibility of a Mediterranean diet.
Flags, cedar posts
Core Collaborators: Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer, Marina Zurkow
Curated by Nora Lawrence
Documentation: Jerry L. Thompson
Commissioned by Storm King Arts Center, New Windsor, New York
For the “Indicators: Artists on Climate Change” exhibition at Storm King
We want to create a public space that signals—and celebrates—a future world of multi-species collaboration. At the UN General Assembly, there’s a seat for every nation. In our General Assembly of the future, there’ll be a seat at the table for all species and all things.
Custom animated software, custom powder-coated steel boxes, hardware, plywood plinths
Fidelity International corporate art collection purchased a complete set of the eight More&More (the invisible oceans) software sculptures.
Emoji collection, available as downloadable images, icon set, instagram filter
In collaboration with Viniyata Pany<br>
Disaster icons illustrated by Manuja Waldia <br>
Resilience icons illustrated by Anna Lin <br>
iOS & Android app developed by Johann Diedrick & Denny George<br>
Thanks to Richard Farren Lapham
Supported by NYU Green Grants, in collaboration with NYU Office of Sustainability
The Climoji are designed to distill some of the causes and effects of climate change into tiny, potent icons.
Food, dandelions, placemats, writing materials, thoughtful company
In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux and Sarah Libertus
with Jim Bovino/Topos, Courtney Tchida, Tracey Deutsch
All images courtesy Dan Marshall.
Presented at The Good Acre, Minneapolis
Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation
The invitation: These Dandelion potlucks provide a community meal space to gather, share food, and explore key questions connecting food and climate change. They’re a more informal chance to add to the meal story sharing toolkit that Making the Best of It has been cultivating.
Dandelions, beets, custom structure, sod, music, paper, costumes, banners
In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux, Sarah Libertus, Aaron Marx
Dandelion kvaas by Jim Bovino
Dandelions and more from Courtney Tchida
All images courtesy Dan Marshall
Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation
“Join us in a ritual festivity that invites you to become more dandelion. From trans-species oration to cow eulogies to intimate ocean tributes, this is the party of Making the Best of It, a communal service compressed into the space of a toast—to how all of us are making the best of it, now and in the future.” MtBoI:D created a church-like refuge in which all were invited to take on a non-human persona and offer a brief remembrance of the human species.
In 2017 I audited a class at ITP (the Interactive Telecommunications Program), Tisch School of the Arts, NYU called “100 Days of Making” led by Katherine Dillon. The class is structured just as the title proclaims: 100 days of unique creative outputs. It is a relentless process, one in which you work fast enough to…
2 Nylon banners, 42” x 84” each
Permanently installed at The Center for Coastal Studies, Provincetown, Mass.
Right whale identification relies on the distinct pattern, known as a callosity, that each whale displays like a blazon on the back of their head. These are rough skin patches — callouses. Whalers called them “bonnets.” Each whale is born with their callous-formation, which grows pitted and grooved like volcanic terrain over time. Callosities would not be visible were it not for the species of cyamids who colonize them, eating algae and the whale’s sloughing outer skin. Cyamids spend all phases of their life cycle on their cetacean hosts. The cyamids who live on North Atlantic right whales know no other species or environment. They can’t swim. They are passed from whale to whale – for instance, from a mother to calf, or while mating. I see both an individually identified whale and its cyamid symbionts; when the whale data states “last seen” or “death year,” I experience the tensions between our capacity to care, to not care, to prefer nameable species, to shun the nameless or “uncharismatic” swarm. These banners honor a colony of commensal animals who, coincidental to their lives on the whale, inadvertently “sign” the whale’s individuality to us human creatures.
Custom commercial postcards, 4″ x 6″
A selection of geographically distributed port nations were analyzed for their relative trade stronghold in particular materials and items. These were then converted into textile designs for new national identities based on the materials’ / items’ corresponding iconography.
A series of swimsuits that visualize the global circulation of stuff, shrinking the overwhelming system of complex trade relationships to a human scale.
Chris Piuma and Marina Zurkow, editors
Contributors Stacy Alaimo, Heather Davis, Kathleen Forde, Dylan Gauthier, Elena Glasberg, Kalliopi Mathios, Steve Mentz, Astrida Neimanis, Chris Piuma, Elspeth Probyn, Sarah Rothberg, Phil Steinberg, Rita Wong, Marina Zurkow
Published by Punctum Books
To order a print copy or download the ebook:
This experimental “brick” of a book intervenes in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (also known as the HS Code). Tucked into the alphabetically sorted 26,000 lines of code are poetic, personal, and scholarly annotations that are focused on ocean-related entries.
Custom animated software in custom powder-coated steel housing
Production: Sarah Rothberg<br>
Software: Sam Brenner
Commissioned in part by Borusan Contemporary
Unifying the disparate commodities from large port nations into a phantasmagoric depot, MORE&MORE: China, India, Japan, Mexico, Turkey, USA, Russia, and Brazil are eight sculptural animations with custom algorithmic software generating hypnotic patterns of export products. These exports are both material trade items as noted in the Harmonized System (HS) tariff code and the nations’…
More&More (The Invisible Oceans), is a catalog of the eponymous project’s first exhibition at bitforms gallery in New York, featuring full-color images of the art on display (including video stills, bespoke bathing suits, and fungal sculptures), as well as an introduction by Marina Zurkow and a conversation between Zurkow and international curator Kathleen Forde.
The ocean makes up 71 percent of our planet’s surface. So, how is it that we know more about Mars than the marine environments of Earth? As impenetrable as the deep oceans are to humans, we imperviously live in a black box of international shipping, reducing the ocean to a surface rather than an environmental…
Dandelion leaves, flowers, tincture, custom structures, costumes, tour guides, umbrellas, meadow
In collaboration with Valentine Cadieux, Sarah Petersen, Aaron Marx
All images courtesy Dan Marshall
Commissioned by Northern Lights.mn and presented as part of Northern Spark, Climate Chaos | Climate Rising, 2016-2017, with the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Knight Foundation
Over the course of 16 months in Minneapolis, geographer and social practice artist Valentine Cadieux and Marina Zurkow, with a group of collaborators and participants, explored what it might mean to “make the best of it” (“it” being climate change), using dandelions to think through eating differently, nimbly, with sadness, resilience and even joy.
Silkscreen on found/used cardboard with rubber stamping
14″x14″
Edition of 3
Additionally unique, SP collages on silkscreen
Accretions is a series of silkscreens on repurposed packaging cardboard. These works describe agglomerations of consumer goods: the result of what is bought, shipped globally, and discarded over time.
Custom Cannonball jellyfish soup powder, caramels, snack puffs
Food prototypes by chefs Ryan Pera (Coltivare), and Justin Yu and Ian Levy (Oxheart)
Supported by CENHS (the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences) at Rice University
Making the Best of It is the umbrella concept for a series of regional site-specific pop-up food shacks, installations, carts, tea houses, delivery drones, and designed community dinners that feature edible climate-change enabled, and often not normally eaten, indicator species as part of the menu.
posters, sound, installations
Core Collaborators: Una Chaudhuri, Fritz Ertl, Oliver Kellhammer, Marina Zurkow
Web Development: Pat Shiu
Sound Design: Pejk Malinovski
Typography: Nancy Nowacek
Voice Overs: Eliza Foss, Seth Kanor, Jane Cramer
Supported by NYU Visual Arts Initiative Awards
Dear Climate is exploring new modes of address through the creation of a collection of ”inner climate” tools. These tools—posters, audio meditations and letters—are designed to nudge participants toward new relations with the greater-than-human world. The free, downloadable posters use the language of agitprop and a “fast read” to create a jolt of relational suggestion. Alternately,…
Surya Mattu, Sarah Rothberg, and I had a Process Space residency through LMCC on Governor’s Island. We spent a few months traveling by boat(s) to meet, study, and discuss logistics. We took Matthew Sparke’s free online class on Globalization and Personal Impacts, and read Deborah Cowan’s The Deadly Life of Logistics. We participated in Open…