One of the world’s most important and influential contemporary art platforms, Frieze, has compiled a list of the most outstanding artworks of the 21st century, which includes the opera-performance Sun & Sea (Marina) by Lithuanian artists Rugilė Bazdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, according to a statement from the creators.
Frieze, the London-based magazine founded in 1991 and organiser of a prestigious international art fair for over two decades, this week released a list of works that have shaped the global contemporary art scene since 2000. Two hundred artists, curators, critics and museum directors were asked to identify the most significant works of the 21st century that reflect the era’s spirit, anxieties and ambitions.
Included in the top 25, defining art of our times, is the singing beach of Sun & Sea (Marina). The collaborative work by Bazdžiukaitė, Grainytė and Lapelytė represented Lithuania at the 2019 Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, where it won the coveted Golden Lion award.
Frieze contributor Fernanda Brenner, curator and founder-director of the independent contemporary art centre Pivô in São Paulo, recalled being struck by the work when she saw it in Venice.
“In the Lithuanian pavilion, artificial sunlight poured over the beach set, where holidaymakers lounged with such intensity that simply watching them inspired guilt. From the balcony above the performers, I gazed at the bodies stretched on the sand: people applying sun cream, children building sandcastles, someone solving a crossword. Then they began to sing.
Sun & Sea (Marina) transformed a typical summer holiday into something unsettlingly eerie: around twenty performers, maintaining calm expressions, sang melancholically about workplace anxiety, ecological despair, and romantic longing. The Golden Lion was deserved, yet the true achievement of the work lies in its chilling insight that we may become accustomed to ongoing catastrophe as if it were background noise,” Brenner wrote in Frieze.
Alongside Sun & Sea (Marina), the list of the most influential works of the first quarter of the century features Swiss video artist Christian Marclay’s 24-hour cinematic experiment The Clock (2010); Belgian artist Francis Alÿs’ performance When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), in which nearly 500 volunteers moved a sand dune 500 metres by just 10 centimetres to embody faith and social transformation; Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth (2007), a 167-metre-long crack in the concrete floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall symbolising collective division; as well as the Golden Lion-winning German artist Anne Imhof’s generational manifesto performance Faust (2017), and works by Harun Farocki, Ibrahim Mahama, Hito Steyerl, among others.
Since its Golden Lion win in 2019, Sun & Sea (Marina) has been presented on five continents, in 31 countries and 41 cities.
In recent weeks, it featured at the International Cervantino Festival in Guanajuato, Mexico, and from October 23 to 26, it was shown at the strikingly designed C4IR centre in Medellín, Colombia.
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