Sofiia Holubeva & Ksenia Kostina

“Sea Looks at You When You Look at the Sea” 2025

(part of the program From Tides to Ebb at the Museum of Contemporary Art Odesa)

In The Sea Looks at You When You Look at the Sea, I propose a reversal of the usual perspective of contemplation: it is not the human who looks at the sea, but the sea that looks at the human. This exchange of gazes shifts the viewer from the position of observer to that of the observed. The imagined viewpoint of the “eyes of the sea” is a distance from which the shore can be seen - a point now inaccessible due to wartime restrictions. The sea emerges not as a backdrop, but as a subject - a living being, a witness to history that responds to the consequences of human activity: destruction, construction, and the appropriation of the coastline.

The work continues my long-term project 40×30×20, dedicated to the transformations of Odesa’s beaches amid war and social change. The format of the series is defined by the size of the suitcase in which I transport my works between Odesa, Berlin, and other cities. The creases on the canvases are not flaws, but material traces of movement - gestures of adaptation to the conditions of war, metaphors of a body forced to “fit” into the limits of a new reality.

The sound component, created by Ksenia Kostina, is based on field recordings of the sea. The rhythmic strikes of waves against the pier form the core of the composition - a metaphor for anxiety, resistance, and breath. The composer transforms these recordings through synthesizers and the mod wheel - a device that modulates sound intensity, imitating the motion of a wave.

“In electronic music, the wave is the foundation of sound: sine, square, triangle, and sawtooth waves construct the musical space. In my composition, these artificial waves interact with the real recordings of the sea, creating polyphony.” - Ksenia Kostina

The audio part of the project becomes the voice of the sea - a voice that trembles, breathes, and responds.

Painting and sound interact as two modes of sensing - visual and acoustic. In their encounter, the sea ceases to be an object of contemplation and becomes a presence that looks back.

The work was created within the exhibition “From Tides to Ebbs” and is the result of a two-week residency during which the artists worked with the archives of the Ukrainian Center for Marine Ecology and attended lectures by scientists from the National Antarctic Scientific Center.

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