Cruising Territories: Group Exhibition

Land is often imagined as stable, and the sea as fluid. Yet this opposition begins to unravel the moment we look more closely. Beneath the fragile lines drawn to contain them, a restless surface quietly shifts: sand migrates, islands drift, coastlines erode, borders move. What, then, happens when land and water meet –- not as opposites, but as a shifting threshold where stability and flux, control and resistance, continuously fold into one another?

Cruising Territories, bringing together works by Heba Y. Amin, Janet Bellotto, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Fatoş İrwen, Sim Chi Yin, Wie-yi T. Lauw, and Cengiz Tekin, unfolds across unstable territories. Here, colonial trade routes persist as contemporary networks, while extractive infrastructures and speculative visions of the past actively reorganize land and sea as enduring systems of depletion. In this light, history, memory, and imagination emerge not as passive records, but as operative forces that structure how space is seen, governed, and traversed.

Within these liminal spaces the exhibition cruises over Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s distinction between smooth and striated space. Smooth space evokes openness, fluidity, and movement such as natural landscapes like deserts or bodies of water, while striated space is structured, measured, and controlled as commodity routes, borders and military grounds. Yet these are not fixed conditions; rather they are entangled and continually transform into one another. These dynamics become tangible in sites where instability surfaces: the shifting shores of Sable Island, the dredged river systems of the Mekong Delta, and the militarized waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Here, stability and instability do not stand in opposition, but coexist, producing territory as a dynamic and contested field.

Cruising Territories drifts within these tensions. To cruise, here, is not simply to move across space, but to navigate uncertainty, to follow routes that are not fully mapped, to remain attentive to what shifts, slips, and resists definition. It reconsiders what it means to stand on ground that is never entirely stable, and to imagine forms of belonging within a world in constant motion.