Entangled Lives: Whales and Humans, Lands and Seas

by Mirra-Margarita Ianeva

Colonialism and capitalism are global systems that have bound together geographies, species, and histories in ways we don’t always recognize. Through this web of forces, the lives of whales and humans and oceans and lands have become deeply intertwined.

Several artists in Weather and the Whale explore how climate change, colonialism, and capitalism are not separate crises, but interconnected ones—difficult to disentangle and even harder to represent. Their works confront the limits of conventional narratives and aesthetic forms to tell these complex stories. They ask: How can we represent multiplicity without reducing it? What forms (visual, sonic, spatial, poetic) can hold the layered realities of loss, resilience, and resistance?

This study guide asks what it might mean to interrupt the logic of capital that seeks to subsume all life into its systems of value, and instead emphasize alternative forms of connections—ones that are nurturing rather than destructive.

REFLECT
Think of a place you have visited or know well. Consider how entanglement—interconnectedness between people, environments, systems, or histories—manifests in that place.

The Different Threats of Entanglement

Entanglement in Fishing Nets

In 2016, Dr. Natalia Botero-Acosta, one of the scientists featured in Weather and the Whale, took part in an operation to free a sixty-foot humpback whale that had become entangled in a fishing net off the Pacific coast of Colombia. After three hours of careful disentanglement, and with the assistance of a second boat, the team successfully freed the whale.

Still from Dr. Natalia Botero-Acosta’s Go Pro video recording of the entangled humpback, 2016. Taken under ANLA permit No. 1177.

Along with ship strikes and noise pollution, entanglement in fishing nets is one of the primary threats whales face today as they make their long annual migrations between breeding and feeding grounds. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Marine Fisheries Service, entanglement is the leading cause of mortality among large whales in US waters. The nets dig into their skin, causing lesions and infections, and
restrict their movement, leading to exhaustion, starvation, or drowning. While significant conservation efforts have focused on establishing sanctuary zones along continental coasts—such as the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, where activities like oil drilling, ocean dumping, and seabed mining are prohibited—these protected areas remain heavily trafficked by cargo and tanker vessels. Moreover, fishing gear, when lost or discarded, does not adhere to human-imposed boundaries.

In cases of entanglement like this, we try to get as much information as we can for the environmental authorities to help them do outreach to highlight the importance of not using bottom trawl nets while the whales are present. We’ve had more entanglements unfortunately since that happened. It’s a conservation threat that demands a lot of people coming together to manage the different needs of the whales and the fishing communities.
Natalia Botero-Acosta, Weather and the Whale catalogue

Flows of Toxins in Monterey Bay, California

Another threat to whales and other marine mammals comes from toxins that flow from agricultural fields and mining sites, traveling through rivers before entering the ocean. In his research in Monterey Bay, Dr. Logan Pallin, another scientist featured in Weather and the Whale, underscores this toxic entanglement of land and sea. He shows that while maps draw sharp boundaries between the two, ecological systems do not.

Installation view showing the long list of toxins found in the body of a Humpback whale, a Sea Lion, a Sea Lion + Pup, and a sea Otter in Monterey Bay.

Between 2023 and 2025, blood and blubber samples collected by Pallin and other researchers revealed at least 144 different halogenated organic compounds (HOCs) in humpback whales, sea otters, and California sea lions that feed in Monterey Bay, which is home to one of the most diverse and abundant assemblages of marine mammals in the world. Many of these compounds are residues of PCBs, used in industrial processes, and DDT, a pesticide used in agriculture. Although both were banned in the 1970s, they persist in the environment as “forever chemicals” and are known to cause immune system dysfunction and lower rates of reproduction across species.

These toxins likely enter the Bay through rivers and estuaries carrying runoff from farms and industrial sites, as well as from the Palos Verdes Shelf Superfund site—a massive underwater DDT dump off the coast of Southern California.

In the clip below, Dr. Logan Pallin discusses the toxicology research he conducts with collaborators in Monterey Bay.

Colonialism’s Webs of Exploitation

In the Weather and the Whale exhibition, “entanglement” refers both to these literal dangers—marine animals caught in fishing lines and debris, or ingesting toxins flowing into the ocean through rivers—and to the entangling forces of colonialism and global capitalism. These systems also ensnare lives and territories, weaving them into webs of dependency, exploitation, and control.

As anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli notes in her book Between Gaia and Ground (2022), colonial power has entangled existence and, in the process, left the earth potted by its toxic activities. She warns against feminist and new materialist theories that emphasize ontological interdependence without attending to the colonial histories of Western entanglements. Not all who are caught in these entanglements have equal power to influence or reshape them.

[After a crisis], those who have the resources can wall off their bodies and environments from cracks by controlling the direction and force of slow violence across various entangled regions and can rebuild more rapidly.

Those who have long benefited from an entangled arrangement refuse to become strained or dissipated by a new arrangement.
ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI

DISCUSS
In a small group, discuss these different meanings of the word “entanglement.”

Representing Interconnected Crises

Many of the artists in Weather and the Whale engage with these varied forms of entanglement, explore creative ways to represent complex webs of relations, and invite us to rethink the ocean not only as a site of violence but also one of sustenance, nurture, and healing.

Climate Crisis, Colonization, and Extraction in Kivalina, Alaska

In her work for the exhibition, media artist Sharon Daniel weaves together the multiple timescales of climate crisis, colonization, and resource extraction as experienced by the Inupiat village of Kivalina, Alaska—a community forcibly settled by the US government on a narrow barrier reef island above the Arctic Circle in the early twentieth century.

Installation view of Sharon Daniel’s *Distant Early Warning* (2025).

Daniel’s multimedia installation Distant Early Warning (2025) unfolds across two walls and a central table in the form of three interwoven timelines. These combine oral testimonies and archival photographs with digital scans of permafrost samples and hyperspectral images of ice cores from Alaska’s McCall Glacier to warn about the climate collapse underway. The installation also highlights how Kivalina residents have resisted the effects of climate change and extractivism in Alaska through legal and political means. This includes a 2003 lawsuit against Teck Cominco, which alleged that the Canadian company operating the Red Dog Mine discharges illegal amounts of waste that contaminate the village’s drinking water, as well as a landmark climate lawsuit in 2008 against 24 oil and energy corporations in an effort to hold the industry accountable for its role in the climate crisis.

I thought the phrase ‘distant early warning’ was very appropriate for the situation in Kivalina, because the members of the community are always saying, “we’re the canary in the coal mine in the Arctic.” Global warming is happening much faster there than in any other part of the world.
Sharon Daniel

Printed on small vignettes or broadcast through portable radios, the voices of Kivalina residents can be heard as they share their stories firsthand. One such testimony comes from Colleen Swan, whose words appear in one of the installation’s timelines:

It used to be [that], in the springtime when the sun came out, [it would start] to melt the ice from the top. But now it’s going both ways and it’s not forming because the ocean is a little too warm for that. So that’s affected our ability to hunt. And that’s why the sea mammals, they have nowhere to haul out, you know, to rest.

COLLEEN SWAN

While each vignette is individually legible, the sheer number of testimonies and historical accounts, as well as the simultaneous transmission of voices on the radios, creates a dense, often indistinguishable textual and sonic landscape. This cacophony reflects the multiplicity of experiences and conveys the complexity of the issues at stake, resisting any singular narrative.

Details of the timelines in *Distant Early Warning.*

In the clip below, Sharon Daniel reflects on her experience visiting Kivalina over a period of a decade and explains her decision to represent the village’s story through overlapping timelines—an aesthetic approach meant to convey the complex, intersecting forces that continue to shape life in the village. She also discusses the many ways in which the law, the courts, and agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have failed the village, even as they purport to regulate emissions and protect the environment.

To learn more about how laws and regulations enable—rather than prevent—the global climate crisis and how climate activists fight back, see Beyond Fossil Law: Climate, Courts, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future (2022) by Ted Hamilton.

Kaleidoscopic Stories of Empire and Warfare

In his multi-layered video installation Kaleidoscope (2025), California-based artist, activist, writer and educator Ashley Hunt links seemingly disparate events like the LA wildfires, British imperialism, and the genocide in Gaza. These threads are braided through a continuous stream of dates and names—historical markers that animate the present with stories of empire, warfare, and colonial violence. Maps of South Africa, Palestine, and Ireland—all sites of British rule—fade in and out, alongside enigmatic lists: causes of rising ocean temperatures (smokestacks, soot, steamships, monoculture) and triggers of political combustion (mines, checkpoints, walls, apartheid, olive trees torn from their roots).

Detail and Installation view of Hunt’s *Kaleidoscope*. The bottom image is a representation of the biblical story of Jonah being swallowed by a whale.

As Hunt reflects in the quote below, the work interrogates the politics of narrative: what counts as admissible or inadmissible within official stories, whether of the LA fires or of genocide in Gaza.

Journalists and government reports, insurance adjusters and class action lawsuits make timelines too. They reach back for causes, accountability, lessons to learn. But each has rules for who can speak and what can be spoken in their discourse. How far back is too far back to be admissible in court? Who possesses the credentials to be a reliable narrator? To count as a source or a witness? To have standing in the courts of history?
ASHLEY HUNT, Weather and the Whale catalogue

Hunt’s work uses the space of art to draw connections between events rarely acknowledged within the same narrative frame—revealing their shared roots in empire and capital.

RESPOND
Free-write in response to Hunt’s questions for 10 minutes.

The Ocean as a Site of Violence and Healing

In Mia Eve Rollow’s three-channel film Moontide Divination (2025), the ocean becomes a space of contradiction—simultaneously a site of violence and of renewal, of extraction and healing. Layering new video, archival images, and media footage of current events from around the world, the piece draws on the significance of the sea across cultures to convey the complex ecologies sustained by the world’s oceans. Locations like Gaza, Indonesia, and the Mediterranean appear throughout the work, bound together by the intersecting forces of colonialism and capitalism.

Mia Eve Rollow’s *Moontide Divination* (2025).

Rollow adopts a cyclical approach to portraying global events as they unfold in the world’s oceans. As suggested by the title, the piece follows a rhythm that mirrors the tides’ natural ebb and flow. It traces a path from the ocean as the source of life, where whale fall nourishes deep-sea ecosystems or subsistence hunting sustains communities; to a setting of intense colonial and militaristic violence, where both human and nonhuman lives are made disposable; and then to a space of healing and ceremony.

Still from Rollow’s *Moontide Divination* showing the carcass of a whale sustaining deep-sea Ocean Life—a process called “whale fall.”

In the clip below, the artist talks about the meaning behind the images she selected for the work. She also discusses the ocean as an oracle—offering insight into humanity’s origins—and reflects on the power of origin stories. Where we begin when telling the story of humanity matters, she suggests; starting points carry political weight.