Can the Seas Survive Us?

A World of Water

15 March – 3 August 2025

A day at the seaside or rain at Wimbledon. So much of our shared experience of the British summer involves water. But what would the world be like without water, or more critically, without our seas and oceans and all the lifeforce within it? The Sainsbury Centre aims to unlock a sense of urgency, recognising that water, and possible geopolitical conflicts caused by it, will be as significant in this century as oil was in the 20^th.

A World of Water brings together works by British and International artists from the last 250 years who have all offered a unique perspective of evolving marine ecosystems and oceanic habitats. Taking the North Sea and the historical relationship between Norfolk and the Netherlands as its starting point, the exhibition looks at the human impact on the sea.

The exhibition encourages visitors to understand the complexity of sea and marine life, whilst encouraging a collective, global effort to mitigate the impacts of climate change and support action to restore marine ecosystems.

Supported by: The Dutch Embassy, Art Fund, John Ellerman Foundation, Hudson Architects.

Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara

15 March – 3 August 2025

Sainsbury Centre is proud to host the UK premiere of Paradise Camp, a celebrated work by Yuki Kihara (b.1975), an interdisciplinary artist of Sāmoan and Japanese descent, which will be exhibited alongside newly commissioned work.

Paradise Camp, which was featured in the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, upcycles the works of French painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), exposing the stereotypical representations of Pacific Islanders in the works that he made whilst living in Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands, which became his most celebrated. Kihara recasts past narratives by using Fa’afafine models – a third gender community in Sāmoa, which Kihara also belongs to – in colourful, hyperreal photographs. Darwin in Paradise Camp will feature original works by Gauguin alongside Kihara’s Paradise Camp for the very first time.

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 seas, as well as the seas themselves.

Supported by: British Council and AHRC Impact Acceleration Account administered by UEA.

Sea Inside

7 June –  26 October  2025

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to live underwater, to be inside a shell, or even the belly of a whale?

While some humans have pursued life above or under water – through seafaring, research, fishing or diving – others have and still are subjected to the horrors of forced or desperate maritime crossings. Yet the sea has often been viewed as an mysterious ‘other’, with its expansive surface and seemingly infinite depths dominating marine imagery in the history of Western art. Conversely, artworks in this exhibition explore the ways the oceans have been domesticated, reimagined on a bodily scale and brought inside to be tamed, contained or better understood.

Sea Inside turns our oceanic gaze towards the sea’s more intimate spaces – whether physical, psychological or imaginary – and dives into shared watery origins, Indigenous ways of life and the items we remove from the sea to display on land.