ArtCenter presents Our Abyssal Kin, a new installation by artists Patty Chang and David Kelley.

The installation is the artists’ most recent collaborative project exploring the impacts of deep-sea mining on the more-than-human—a category that prioritizes the primacy of relationships between species, elements, and forces over individual entities, such as humans. Its large-scale installation, four-channel video, and glass and ceramic sculptures with animal and mineral specimens invite us to meditate on our relationships with the pasts, presents, and futures of the deep sea.

Our Abyssal Kin poetically tells the story of deep-sea ecology within historical struggles for agency and liberation. Complete with the artists’ four-channel video work, Stray Dog Hydrophobia (2024), the works in the exhibition subvert dominant narratives about the ocean’s role as a resource. As pressures to pivot away from fossil fuels rise, governments and corporations are increasingly interested in extracting critical minerals from the seabed to build electric infrastructures and consumer goods. The exhibition foregrounds the urgency of reimagining nature not as an extractable resource or abstracted space but as something “inextricably and interdependently linked to human life,” as Chang and Kelley propose.