“Humanity must do better, to stop the harm to the planet.”
“This is our home. It is up to us to save it for the next generation.”
These are just two of the visitor feedback stickers on the wall as you leave the first two exhibitions within the Sainsbury Centre’s Can the Seas Survive Us? season.
In March, NASA reported that last year we saw an unexpectedly high rise in sea levels, with the rate of increase reaching nearly a quarter of an inch per year, surpassing the expected 0.17 inches.
Rising sea levels exacerbate storm surges, threaten urban infrastructure, erode coastlines, disrupt ecosystems, and increase high-tide flooding.
In February, it was reported that the community of the island of Gardi Sugdub is the first in Panama to be relocated because of climate change. It is predicted by scientists that rising sea levels will make the island uninhabitable by 2050.
With most residents boarding boats bound for new homes, just 100 residents remained in June last year. The aerial images are frightening.
Responsible for less than 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions, Pacific Islanders’ proximity to the sea means they are amongst the most vulnerable to changing weather conditions.
In Yuki Kihara’s solo show Darwin in Paradise Camp, the artist advocates how we should be working together to tackle issues such as climate change.
Throughout her practice, Kihara engages with European art histories and archives to question stereotypical representations of the Pacific.
Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara is on display as part of the art museum’s new season of exhibitions. It features the UK premiere of Paradise Camp, a photographic series first presented at the Aotearoa New Zealand Pavilion in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, alongside original works by Paul Gauguin and a newly commissioned video work, Darwin Drag.
The exhibition foregrounds how a closer relationship between humanity and the seas can save the communities most at risk of the human-caused impact on the oceans, as well as the seas themselves.
Kihara recasts past narratives by using Fa’afafine and Fa’afatama models – the third and fourth gender communities in Sāmoa - in colourful, hyperreal photographs reflecting Gauguin’s compositions.
Darwin Drag is inspired by new research by writers such as Dr Ross Brooks and Joan Roughgarden which reveals how Charles Darwin manipulated some of his findings to suggest non-heteronormative species and same-sex attraction in animals was rare and unnatural, in order to conform with the conservative values of the Victorian period. The work is presented alongside corresponding fish specimens, on loan from the Natural History Museum.
Fa’afafine is a third gender culturally recognised in Sāmoa, translating to ‘in the manner of a woman’. Kihara represents the Fa’afafine community in her work – to which the artist also belongs - and collaborates with the people of this community, engaging them in, amongst other things, climate change awareness workshops.
In the traditional village context, the Fa’afafine and Fa’atama (translating to ‘in the manner of a man’) are assigned the role of caregivers. Kihara talks of how these communities were the first to respond during a natural disaster in Sāmoa, yet the policies and legislations around climate change in Sāmoa are most often written in a binary way that excludes the Fa’afafine and Fa’atama’s contribution.
The Sainsbury Centre’s urgent exhibitions are a beautifully celebratory look at our world’s oceans, but they are also an urgent reminder of the potentially perilous future facing our seas.
They urge us to address a topic we know to be happening but is too ugly for many of us to think about.
Global warming is happening and we must do better.
Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara, plus A World of Water are on display at the Sainsbury Centre until August 3, 2025 as part of the Can the Seas Survive Us? season. Sea Inside opens as the third and final exhibition in the season and will run from June 7 to October 26, 2025.
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