Adrift Lab (Detached)

22nd Biennale of Sydney

Adrift Lab is a dedicated group of scientists studying all things adrift in the ocean. They identify long-term trends and quantify the impact of marine plastic pollution on the oceans, its wildlife, and on ourselves. Such work is often hidden from our everyday lives. But for the duration of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Adrift Lab, in collaboration with Detached Cultural Organisation, will occupy a space on Cockatoo Island, NSW, to offer a rare glimpse of these edge-worlds.

An arrangement of wooden tables, reclaimed from various rubbish dumps, will display a number of specimens, thousands of images, hours of video, and years of research. Each table references the kitchen table in Adrift Lab’s home base on Lord Howe Island, the backstage of science: a site of conversation, intellectual discussion, and far-ranging debate, driven by curiosity and detached inquiry, a place to debrief after each day in the field, to console, to laugh, and to prepare oneself for the following day’s reckoning with the arc of human indifference. Each display projects what has accrued from these endless discussions and diurnal fieldwork.

This exhibit is an invitation for each of us to shed complacency, and to continue the conversation, in our everyday lives, at our own tables.

More information on Adrift Lab here

Dates: 14 March – 8 June 2020

New Dates: 16 June - 6 September 2020

Location: Cockatoo Island, Sydney, NSW