Ase Brunborg Lie
Intersected Waterbodies
9.5.–10.8.2025
PARABOL

Ase Brunborg Lie’s sound work Intersected Waterbodies dives into the ocean’s depths. Thousands of meters below the surface, we encounter the seabed’s ecology with admiration and wonder—but also with a drive to exploit and conquer, desires embedded in human nature.

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With its poetic soundscape, Intersected Waterbodies explores possible entangled pasts and futures for humans, technology, and more-than-human life on the deep seabed. What life forms might be there in the future? And how can we leave those who remain with as much care as possible? The work takes its starting point in deep-sea mining, where minerals are extracted from precarious and largely unknown ecosystems beneath the seabed. This is paradoxically done to obtain metals deemed essential for the green shift and a sustainable technological future. By planning to open areas for deep-sea mining in the Arctic, the Norwegian government is disregarding serious warnings from the Norwegian Environment Agency, European Union, and the wider international scientific community. While the government’s plans are currently postponed, the fight to preserve one of the planet’s last untouched ecologies continues.

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Meeting current environmental challenges is urgent, and innovation is needed to respond to rapidly changing realities. But can a just and better future emerge by excavating the very place where all life on Earth may have originated—a completely unique ecology we know little about, and understand even less when it comes to the consequences of its destruction?

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The sonic work originates from a larger multimedia installation, first presented at the Meta.Morf Biennale in 2020, and now adapted for PARABOL, the sound shower located in Kunsthall 3,14’s entrance hall.

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Ase Brunborg Lie explores philosophical and ethical questions within the ongoing ecological crisis—how to create and work toward more just futures. Working across a wide range of media, their artistic practice is shaped by queer-feminist, postcolonial, scientific, and fabulating modes of thinking and making. They completed the post-master program Of Public Interest Lab at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, and hold an MA in Scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy and a BA from Trondheim Art Academy, NTNU. Lie lives and works in Oslo, Norway.