Anna Boghiguian: The Sunken Boat at ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum

The sea, in Anna Boghiguian’s hands, is not a backdrop but an archive, one that absorbs trade routes, colonial circuits, migrations, and debris.
At ARoS, Denmark’s, Aarhus most expansive museum, the artist stages her first Nordic solo exhibition as a reckoning with the residues that history fails to wash away.

Born in Cairo in 1946 to Armenian parents, Boghiguian is known for her itinerant, research-driven practice that blends drawing, sculpture, text, and sound into layered historical narratives. Her work does not retell events so much as expose their sediment, the salt, silt, and shadow left by commerce and displacement.

The exhibition gathers four works made between 2015 and 2025, each approaching that sediment from a different direction - trade routes, philosophical dialogue, geopolitical contest. At their center is the work that gives the show its name.

The exhibition’s title work, The Sunken Boat: A Glimpse into Past Histories (2025), created partly on-site in Aarhus, feels both monumental and ephemeral.

A papier-mâché diver lies in sand among glass mussel shells and paper fish; the sound of surf recorded in Alexandria, Margate, and Aarhus binds the installation to three coasts three thresholds of departure and return. A mural painted directly on the museum wall will vanish when the show closes in April 2026, its destruction folded into the work’s meaning.

Across these installations, the past is not retrieved but stirred, the sea as witness rather than metaphor. The Sunken Boat extends Boghiguian’s ongoing question: how can art articulate the histories submerged beneath economic and ecological collapse?

In a time when Mediterranean crossings and rising waters redefine what coastlines mean, her work proposes no conclusion, only a fragile act of remembrance. Whether the mural’s erasure will register as loss or completion is, fittingly, left unresolved.

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