Ship of Fools / The Dockers' Museum
Allan Sekula
Gallery 2‍

This exhibition presents works by artist Allan Sekula (1951–2013), courtesy of the collection of  M HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. Sekula was an influential American photographer, writer, critic, and filmmaker, with a particular interest in workers’ rights and maritime issues.

Influenced by his upbringing near the port of San Pedro in Los Angeles, Sekula explored how technological advancements in shipping reshaped labour and global commerce. As a committed Marxist and anti-war activist, he used photography to critique the commodification of culture and global capitalism, highlighting the often-overlooked contributions of dockworkers and labourers. Sekula’s work addresses tensions between art, activism, and social justice, reflecting his own experiences during a period of industrial decline.

The works on display here are from a vast, evolving body of work, comprising objects and photographs, only a small selection of which are shown. The project is divided into two distinct but interrelated parts: Ship of Fools and The Dockers’ Museum. Ship of Fools is a series of photographs that document Sekula’s time aboard the Global Mariner, a cargo vessel which had been repurposed by the International Transport Workers’ Federation to highlight the exploitative labour conditions of seafarers and dockworkers. In 1998, the Global Mariner embarked on a worldwide voyage, with Sekula intermittently joining the crew over the following two years. The photographs exhibited here in Gallery 2 draw attention to the harsh realities of shipping, exposing the hidden social costs of globalisation. They also celebrate the remarkable lives, solidarity, and personal stories of those working at sea.

The Dockers’ Museum, shown alongside Ship of Fools, comprises over 1,000 items — including various objects, graphic images, postcards, and prints — that Sekula acquired between 2010 and 2013, mainly during his travels but also via eBay. Like Ship of Fools, The Dockers’ Museum offers a powerful commentary on the plight of workers. It transforms a diverse but carefully curated collection of objects into a compelling exploration of themes such as workers’ rights, the environmental and human costs of capitalism, and Britain’s colonial past.

This exhibition, co-curated by Alejandro Acín (IC Visual Lab) and George Harwood Smith (East Quay), holds particular resonance for Watchet, a coastal town on the Bristol Channel with a rich seafaring history. Watchet’s past as a cross-channel port, integral to transporting raw materials between Wales and Somerset, is echoed in Sekula’s work — from figurines of coal-miners to dockworkers carrying sacks of goods. Certain items in the collection highlight poignant local, national, and international histories. For instance, Sekula’s figures of mine-workers and a caricatured head of Margaret Thatcher evoke the miners’ strikes of the 1980s, while a radiation calculator from the U.S. Army references the Cold War nuclear threat.

Presented alongside Ship of Fools and The Dockers’ Museum is a film commissioned by IC Visual Lab in partnership with Bristol Photo Festival, Avonmouth Community Centre, and Bristol Port Company. Made by artist Kit Hall, the film is set in Avonmouth, upstream along the Bristol Channel, which served as a busy port for larger ships in the early twentieth century. Located on the outskirts of Bristol, Avonmouth provided up to 5,000 jobs at its peak until the advent of container ships dramatically reduced the number of dockworkers.

Hall’s film highlights the often-overlooked contributions of women to the region’s industrial and maritime heritage — a perspective also reflected in some of the photographs in The Dockers’ Museum. Women from Avonmouth reenact roles in the local industries that once thrived around the port, including papermaking and textile production. Although the factories have long since closed, they were integral to the community’s identity and economic life. By occupying historically male-dominated spaces and reenacting past roles, the film offers a poignant reflection on memory, labour, and resilience — and serves as a reminder of how these landscapes and the communities that shaped them have transformed. The film forms part of a broader initiative, All That Flows Comes to Rest, which aims to create a resident-led community archive celebrating Avonmouth’s contemporary history and its stories of labour and place.

‍About Allan Sekula
During his lifetime, Sekula earned accolades including the U.S. Artists Fellows Award, Camera Austria, and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. His artworks are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Tate in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, among others. Other works by Sekula that explore the maritime world include Fish Story, featured in Documenta XI (2002), and his subsequent films The Lottery of the Sea (2006) and The Forgotten Space (2010). Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum was his final major project before his death in 2013.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Collection M HKA (Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp) for loaning the exhibition to East Quay. East Quay also thanks Alejandro Acín, Director of IC Visual Lab, Bristol, for co-curating this exhibition.

⁠Image: Good Ship Bad Ship (Limassol). Allan Sekula: Ship of Fools, (1999-2010). From The Estate of Allan Sekula, Los Angeles. ⁠