36.5/ New York Estuary by Sarah Cameron Sunde

September 14, 2022
7:27am – 8:06pm
12 hours, 29 minutes

The Cove, Vernon Blvd., Queens

Built in collaboration with communities around the world, Sunde stands in a body of water for a full tidal cycle. 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea  is a series of nine site-specific performances and video artworks that activate the public on personal, local, and global scales in conversations around deep time, embodied experience, and sea-level rise. Beginning in 2013 with a simple poetic gesture in response to Hurricane Sandy hitting New York, Sarah stood in water for 12 hours and 48 minutes while the tide rose and fell on her body. Since then, 36.5 has grown into a complex, collaborative, evolving series of works involving hundreds of people in communities around the world: Maine, Mexico, San Francisco, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya, Aotearoa-New Zealand, and New York City. Over several months, often years, Sarah builds deep and meaningful collaborations with local communities who live near a body of water where sea-levels are expected to rise. Working with a local team, she films the entire event in real time, and translates this footage into a durational video work to be shown in museums, galleries, and public spaces. The ninth and final work in the series will premiere on September 14, 2022 in so-called Queens, Lenapehoking-New York City.

36.5 / NEW YORK ESTUARY is the culminating work in the series, 36.5 / ADurational Performance with the Sea, and the culminating event in the Works on Water 2020-2022 Triennial. It will be a large-scale global event involving several hundreds of people around the world on September 14, 2022. The live performance will take place in the Cove on the East River where Astoria meets Long Island City in Queens, on Wed, Sept 14, 2022. Sarah will stand in water for 12 hours, 39 minutes, a full tidal cycle, inviting the public to participate by joining her in water and/or marking the passing of hours from shore as “the human clock.” Artist collaborators will create interventions and installations to amplify the performance. Viewing stations around the Cove, on Roosevelt Island and Upper East Side, Manhattan will allow audiences to gather from various viewpoints.

For more details about 36.5/ New York Estuary and the eight international re-enactments taking place on the same day, please visit here.

Water in the Streets by Sarah Cameron Sunde and Nathan Kensinger

Water in the Streets is a video work that invites us to bear witness to the encroaching edges of Far Rockaway during the "sunny day flooding" event in May 2021. Combining the research, performance, and video art practices of Sarah Cameron Sunde and Nathan Kensinger, this project was created for Tending the Edge and asks: What do these monthly flooding events say about our future and what does it mean for New York City?

Performance and video made in collaboration with Rockaway Youth Task Force, with support from Beach64Retreat. Music by Joshua Dumas. Produced by Maya Shah for Tending the Edge, a collaboration with Works on Water, Culture Push, and the Department of City Planning.

Water in the Streets

Sarah Cameron Sunde

in collaboration with Nathan Kensinger and Rockaway Youth Task Force with support from Beach64Retreat

At high tide during the full moon in May, as Jamaica Bay spills into the streets in Far Rockaway, Sunde and local collaborators will stand in the streets with the rising water. Constituents and Mayoral Candidates are invited to join in and bear witness to the encroaching edge. The performance will be filmed and shown for all New Yorkers’ to see this monthly flooding. 

This work is an extension and research-based part of Sunde's large-scale series of site-specific performances and video artworks, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, 2013 - present, which will culminate at the Cove at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2022.

Week 17: Sarah Cameron Sunde

Sarah Cameron Sunde invites the public to face the water and spend a week tracking the NYC tidal shifts in relationship to the land, our bodies, and global sea level rise. The culminating work in her series, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013 - present) was originally scheduled to take place in Hallet’s Cove, Queens, on Saturday, September 5 from 6:43am - 7:09pm. But due to COVID-19, Sunde will mark the moment with a process-based livestream event for those 12 hours and 26 minutes.

36.5/Mannahatta

36.5 / Mannahatta was a one-time performance in Zuccotti Park that invited performers to connect with the tidal shift in the water surrounding the city and the streams below that were buried under layers of dirt and concrete long ago. The movement is based on a portion of Sarah Cameron Sunde’s ongoing series of works, 36.5 / a durational performance with the sea, in which the public is invited to participate by standing in the water for an extended period of time and by marking the passing hours on the shore with a series of choreographed movements.

36.5/Mannahatta was part of the Arts Brookfield Series at Zuccotti Park.*

Time and Tide: A Literally Immersive Performance and the New Climate Temporalities

Led by Eco-Critic and NYU professor Una Chuadhuri
Participants include WOW artist and curatorial team member Sarah Cameron Sunde (36.5) and Awam Amkpa, author of Theatre and Post-Colonial Desires

What happens when the dimension of human life that has long been the very definition of predictability--the climate--becomes utterly unpredictable? How can art create new embodied knowledge for living in this time of "The Great Acceleration"? Eco-critic Una Chaudhuri and a panel of scientists and artists will engage Sarah Cameron Sunde about her ongoing project "36.5: A Durational Performance with the Sea."

Why Water / Why Water Now

Panel discussion with Works on Water artists and curatorial team members Eve Mosher and Sarah Cameron Sunde, facilitated by Tal Beery

There seems to have been a major expansion of artists working in, on, or with water over the past few years. Artists are building boats and taking people on tours, sculptures are being installed in rivers and oceans, and performances draw audiences to the waterfront. Many artists are at least partly responding to the vulnerability of water to industrial pollution and climate change. The panel considered the environmental, social, and technological changes that have sparked the new water art movement.

36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea

Four-channel video installation

Duration: 12 hours, 46 minutesand 12 hours, 21 minutes, looped

Sunde pairs durational video from 36.5 / North Sea and 36.5 / Bay of Bengal where she stood in tidal bays for the full tidal cycle. A short movement piece based on the public participation for the piece was performed in Zuccotti Park on June 29.