He Art Museum acquires Stanislava Pinchuk’s monumental 76-piece marble installation

3 Nov 2023

We are proud to announce the acquisition of Stanislava Pinchuk’s monumental 76-piece marble installation The Wine Dark Sea by He Art Museum in Guangdong, China.

The Wine Dark Sea is a personal meditation on ideas of home and of migration. The work tells the story of the leaked Nauru and Manus Island cables alongside poetry and prose from Homer’s “Odyssey”. Engraved into the stone works, near-identical phrases have been taken from both sources, and their protagonists swapped; Odysseus becomes [REDACTED], and vice versa.

Taking inspiration from the Tomb of Homer on the island of Ios, Greece; the work comprises of modular and stackable stones, forever swapped into vernacular arrangements, without a single final form.

The Wine Dark Sea challenges us to consider why we embrace Homer’s Odyssey as the first ’migrant novel’ and as a key foundation to our understanding of both literature and democracy while struggling with the same narratives of displacement, frustration and exile in our time and on our own doorstep.

He Art Museum is a privately funded non-profit museum designed by Pritzker Prize winner Tadao Ando.