Launching 22 November 2025, The Sunken Boat marks Anna Boghiguian’s first solo exhibition in the Nordic region. The exhibition explores global maritime history, rising sea levels and the climate crisis through immersive installations.
“With her sharply cut paper silhouettes and fragmented narratives, Anna Boghiguian creates a poetic stream of images in which echoes of the past mirror the turmoil of the present. The exhibition at ARoS invites the audience on a journey through time and thought, where themes such as migration, power and human change emerge with unsettling beauty and profound relevance,” says ARoS’ Museum Director Rebecca Matthews.
The exhibition features four compelling installations created between 2015 and 2025: The Salt Traders (2015), Conversation with Clarice Lispector around ‘The Passion According to G.H.’ (2019), The Chess Game (2022) and The Sunken Boat: A Glimpse into Past Histories (2025), the latter of which has been created for Anna Boghiguian’s exhibition at Turner Contemporary.
Complementing these works is To the Lighthouse (2019), a series of 23 acrylic paintings on metal that draw thematic and visual inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s seminal 1927 novel of the same name. One of the exhibition’s central works, The Chess Game, is a monumental 8 x 8 metre installation that brings together a cast of influential historical figures — including Marie Antoinette, Franz Ferdinand, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Steiner — alongside other pivotal voices from the realms of politics, science and philosophy.
Through 24 life-sized, hand-painted figures crafted from cardboard, wood and acrylic panels, Boghiguian stages a symbolic chess match in which these characters confront one another in a dynamic struggle for power and influence.
Artwork addressing the climate crisis
The Sunken Boat: A Glimpse into Past Histories confronts the urgent realities of the climate and environmental crisis, as well as the issue of rising sea levels. At its centre is a floating papier-mâché sculpture of a diver, slightly larger than life, positioned above a vast mound of sand, evoking the seabed as both a literal and symbolic space. Surrounding the diver are vibrant glass shells, sculptures of underwater swimmers and an array of painted paper cut-outs depicting fish, all contributing to a rich and immersive underwater tableau.
The installation is accompanied by a soundscape composed of sea recordings captured in the cities of Alexandria, Egypt; Margate, England; and Aarhus, Denmark. As a final layer to the installation, Boghiguian has painted a mural directly onto the gallery wall at ARoS, forming a backdrop that anchors the work in place and time. “There is a world beneath the surface of the sea that is very different from the world we know above the sea. The work is about that world. It is like diving into yourself and discovering yourself,” says Anna Boghiguian.
The Sunken Boat invites you into a vivid and contemplative universe where historical narratives, personal memories and the contemporary crises converge. In Boghiguian’s hands, the sea becomes more than a motif — it emerges as a living force, a deep current that connects our collective past to the decisions that shape our future.
Press release from ARoS
Image: Anna Boghiguian. The Sunken Boat. 2025. Installation view from The Sunken Boat at ARoS, 2025. Photography by Mads Smidstrup © ARoS 2025
