In her Tallinn studio, Kristina Õllek was finalising a new installation for the group exhibition For All at Last Return, curated by Emma Dean and opening on 8 November 2025 at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (UK). October sunlight filtered through the windows, landing on a crucial element of the installation: a series of screen-like surfaces where sea salt, algae, bacteria, and other marine materials were growing, depositing, and transforming through natural processes. These hybrid interfaces, in which environmental matter produces its own forms of imaging, form the foundation of complex assemblages combining video, photography and sculptural elements.
Over the past five years since our last collaboration (Tiger in Space, EKKM, 2020, curated with Marten Esko and Lea Vene), Õllek’s artistic research on marine ecologies has evolved alongside the intensifying condition of climate breakdown, responding to human impact on the oceans with work that is both materially rigorous and conceptually expansive. This autumn, she is taking part in Down Deep. Living Seas, Living Bodies (State Art Gallery Sopot, Poland), curated by Joseph Constable, and just juuri nüüd nyt (Foku gallery, Tallinn), curated by Hertta Kiiski, among others, while she also prepares another newly commissioned work for Dulwich Picture Gallery next year (a duo show in London with Konrad Mägi in collaboration with Kumu Art Museum, curated by Kathleen Soriano), and a duo show with Tuomas A. Laitinen, curated by Anna Mustonen in 2027 in Finland.
Across all these years, the sea has remained her constant and closest collaborator.
Õllek’s new work Breathing Deep Currency for the Baltic continues a trajectory that began with Nautilus New Era (2018), inspired by Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870). In Verne’s story, Captain Nemo speaks of rich metal deposits on the ocean floor, suggesting that their extraction might one day be within reach. This proto-science-fiction fantasy has now become a tangible reality and a political, economic, and ethical issue of our time: deep-sea mining is promoted as a necessary step in the transition to renewable sources of energy, with rare-earth and other minerals such as manganese (a critical industrial metal for steel and battery production) deemed essential for renewable technologies. This promise reflects a Promethean belief in salvation through technology, even as we persist in the paradox of extracting and accumulating ever more. It comes at a devastating cost: the minerals may fuel the illusion of a sustainable future, but fragile ecosystems, seafloor habitats, and countless species are destroyed in the process. It is difficult to believe that any new technology could improve environmental conditions within a system that imposes no limits on growth and extraction on a finite planet. For now, the only certainty remains what it has always been: the expanding profits of the corporations involved.
Finding Dark Oxygen
While preparing her recent work, Õllek was in dialogue with marine scientists at the University of Newcastle, who study deep-sea ecologies. The encounter between scientists and artists is, in many ways, an encounter between different worldviews and methodologies: distinct ways of knowing, perceiving, and, above all, doing research. “Each scientist has a very deep knowledge of a very specific focus”, Õllek told me, “but they often avoid discussing broader implications. They’re careful not to express personal views”. Unlike scientific research, artistic research inhabits a state of perpetual becoming, where unexpected knowledge emerges through exploration, transformation, and speculative practice – always open, never fully complete. Õllek noted how scientific freedom is increasingly constrained by funding and private interests: “A senior scientist told me my work was inspiring because artists still have the freedom to explore ideas scientists can’t always pursue. Science once allowed more experimentation, but now funding and expectations direct it.”
Among the discoveries that most struck Õllek was from a decade-long study by the Scottish Association for Marine Science, whose results were published in 2024, which revealed a second source of oxygen produced entirely without sunlight, on the deep ocean floors. ‘Dark Oxygen’ (a colloquial name) is generated by manganese nodules in complete darkness, and suggests that entire ecosystems may depend on non-photosynthetic oxygen production. This view radically challenges our assumptions about where and how life can exist, and thus potentially redefines the parameters for searching for it beyond our planet. Yet these findings often conflict with the interests of the mining companies funding such research. “When the scientists published their discovery” Õllek said, “the mining company tried to downplay the results as it could hinder extraction. The scientists had to stand against them, and also find another funding source to continue their research. It’s been concerning to learn that some researchers may even face pressure to remain silent or to expose only a partial result of their findings.”Õllek’s practice dwells in the tension between human extraction and the resilience of life, exploring the often-invisible processes that sustain oceanic ecosystems, and a deep awareness of how much remains unknown. Her works occupy these interstitial zones, where boundaries between organic and synthetic, human and non-human, scientific and fictional become porous. Nautilus New Era already reflected this tension, imagining the ocean as a techno-political landscape of both wonder and exhaustion. Her new body of work deepens that inquiry departing from the recent discovery of Dark Oxygen, asking how image-making can reveal what remains unseen, the invisible infrastructures and living processes that sustain the planet.
Breathe in, breathe out
Nautilus New Era was one of the pieces Daniela Arriado and I were happiest to include in the Screen City Biennial 2019, which we curated together in several venues in Stavanger. The city, both the heart of Norway’s oil industry and a magnet for cruise tourism, embodied the contradictions of extractive practices that Õllek’s work investigates. The work was installed in the cruise terminal, a glass building overlooking the North Sea, which seemed the perfect setting for a work in which the sea itself is both subject and context. We had planned carefully around ship arrivals and departures, but on the day of the opening, a massive cruise liner unexpectedly docked just outside, eclipsing the horizon and transforming the work’s relationship to the sea. Suddenly, the installation appeared dwarfed by the machinery of consumption it sought to question. We laughed at the irony because control in the public space is always provisional: the environment inevitably responds in unpredictable ways that we prefer to embrace than oppose.
When the ship finally departed, the horizon reopened and the work regained its line of sight to the water, as if breathing again. But that short moment revealed something essential about the conditions we inhabit, and that Õllek’s practice captures sharply: that we persist through cycles of pressure and release, through the pulse between obstruction and renewal, visibility and concealment, contraction and expansion. A continuous, inevitable rhythm, that is mirrored in the act of breathing itself.
