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A. Conveyor / The New Gallery
![“Destination: WHERE SHIPS GO 2 DIE” ~ Zeenat Nagree On one side of the ocean, the Atlantic Conveyor used to touch shore at Halifax, New York, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, and Houston. On the other side, Liverpool, London, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Gothenburg. This circuit of trade sustained the Conveyor’s existence from 1985 to 2017. In Halifax, the Atlantic Conveyor and its four companion ships were familiar vessels with containers stacked on their large open bodies. Chris Boyne, who grew up in Halifax, saw the Conveyor on its last trip there in 2017. Thereafter, the ship left the Atlantic Ocean and operated briefly along the coast of south-eastern Africa, and was then beached at a breaking yard in Alang in western India on the 7th of October that year. Before leaving for Alang, the Conveyor’s prominent logo—ACL, which stood for the name of its fleet, the Atlantic Container Lines—was painted over in an absurd attempt at secrecy towards an escape that was known and certain.[1] Boyne travelled to Alang in 2019, on the trail of the Conveyor, two years after it had apparently disappeared and ceased to exist, with the task of recovering an object that once belonged to the ship. He found an engine part that was used to inject fuel, and a lifeboat seat, both of which were then shipped to Halifax, stored in Boyne’s studio in Montreal, and are now on display in Calgary.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c5b08b6e40cadbce3a1e71d3575eb578dff1ca7200db4485f45e7860032e9f14/page2Artboard-1.jpg)
![The last location of the Atlantic Conveyor, according to some marine traffic websites, is Jacksonville in Florida, although the ship never serviced the port nor was it dismantled there.[2] Boyne speculates that the transmitter may have been purchased as surplus and transported to Florida before being turned off, or, perhaps, it was taken there to conceal the Conveyor’s location. Or, it may be a glitch with a different explanation. These ‘displacements’—the engine part Boyne brought to a gallery in Calgary, or the location transmitter logging in from Jacksonville—suggest that the ontological integrity of the Atlantic Conveyor is not necessary for the possibility of multiple afterlives. While ships are always broken so that their components can be repurposed elsewhere, through the act of framing such dispersal, Boyne highlights a question that could be asked about any ship once it is run aground: When did the Atlantic Conveyor cease to exist? Further, he complements this question with another enquiry: Can this cessation be reversed by preserving an object from the ship as an artwork? The function of the recovered object—the engine part, for instance—is entirely altered in the gallery. It remains arrested, on a pedestal, detached from its previous body. Otherwise, it may have ended up on another ship as a spare, or it may have been melted down to a different form. There is also the possibility that Boyne will sell it in the future as scrap. In the meantime, the engine part evokes the past existence of the Atlantic Conveyor, and if the viewer is willing, its presence produces phantom lines encapsulating the gallery and its surrounding buildings in a rectangle measuring 276.10 metres x 32.26 metres x 20.25 metres, the exact size of the Atlantic Conveyor. This aura, however, can be punctured with a doubt—how can we be sure that the engine part is from the Atlantic Conveyor and not another ship, or if it is from a ship at all? Has Boyne been duped or is he duping us?](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2c22a677e40f01484adf920bca06827052d9b7991c0c61cd903b28e2e4759771/page4Artboard-1.jpg)
![Maritime transport accounts for the movement of nearly 80% of goods by volume bought and sold globally. The burdens of this trade—such as the disposal of cargo ships—are distributed unequally depending on the economic power of various nation states, with the heaviest consequences borne by the working class of developing countries where the shipbreaking industry is based.[5] Within the context of India, workers are likely to be migrants and from lower caste communities already at risk of systemic discrimination and exploitation.[6] The damaging and destructive methods used in Alang directly implicate shipowners, cash buyers, breaking companies, and regulatory authorities, but they also indirectly implicate consumers that these networks of trade cater to. The veiled movements of capital appear distant and tedious to trace, but they are not entirely invisible. Outside some of the shipbreaking yards Boyne visited in Alang, safety slogans in English and Hindi were painted on walls and gates. Many of the slogans in both languages placed the onus of safety on workers asking them to “think,” to use “foresight,” to “stay alert,” to receive training before coming to work, and to not forget to wear protective gear. Others abstractly extolled the virtue of safety and a clean environment. Boyne’s reproduction of the following slogan appears in the gallery: No Safety Know Pain Know Safety No Pain Safety First Wear PPE and Stay Protected Its casual word play on the subject of painful injury points to the unequal distribution of burden between the workers on one side, and the shipbreaking industry, the shipping industry, and its consumers on the other. Shipping lobbies and shipping companies justify their continued use of breaking yards in Alang by claiming that improvements have taken place at a number of yards— information which is not available for independent verification. In the last few years, yard owners say they have begun installing impermeable flooring for secondary cutting to reduce pollution, and using cranes for lifting large plates to avoid accidents.[7] In 2019, the world’s largest shipping company, Maersk, announced on its website, “Responsible ship recycling in Alang is possible” and claims to have invested in upgrading breaking standards both for workers, and the environment in one particular yard that they contract to.[8] A majority of the yards in Alang now hold “statements of compliance” with the 2009 Hong Kong Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships, which India signed in 2019.[9] The Hong Kong Convention, which is not yet in force, has been criticised for permitting beaching as a method of shipbreaking. Even if conditions across Alang are improving, the statements of compliance or certifications issued to yards in Alang are prepared by agencies engaged by the yard owners themselves, and are therefore seen as attempts at greenwashing.[10] In 2019, the Indian government passed the Recycling of Ships Act with the aim of regulating the industry, however the law has been criticised for being inadequate and vague in its protection of the workers and the environment.[11] Yet, safety slogans centre workers in the discourse of responsibility, safety, and vigilance.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/36850d94b6640e58a522e71cf752c3d79e194a7721b91774d36c92355f939b2f/page7Artboard-1.jpg)
![If independent activists and owners of shipbreaking yards have opposing views on the practices in place in the industry, former crew members express an entirely different concern about shipbreaking. Crew often use online shipbreaking forums to share memories and to lament the loss of a ship as if it were a living being, with a body and soul.[12] When the Atlantic Conveyor was headed to Alang, its crew described its final destination as the place “WHERE SHIPS GO 2 DIE.”[13] Death becomes synonymous with breaking. The loss being mourned is not just of the ship itself, but of a past when ships were supposedly well-designed and well-made— even though the breaking of old ships is often polluting precisely because those vessels were constructed with materials like asbestos that are now known to be hazardous. As it is for the crew, Boyne’s interest in the Atlantic Conveyor comes from a place of lived connection. The Conveyor was made in 1984, the year Boyne was born; it was part of the landscape of Boyne’s childhood, and incidentally Boyne got a chance to bid farewell to the ship on its last voyage to Halifax. However, Boyne’s task of recovering an object from the ship does not emerge from a position of romanticism. His task does not centre feeling, nor makes a fetish of the acquired object. He could have found anything. He could have found nothing. Failure was not a hindrance to the completion of the task nor was authenticity its goal. The task moves outward from the person of the artist to an engagement with structures both political and economic, and concerns anyone served by the shipping industry. Anyone could have carried out the task Boyne outlined for himself, and anything could have been acquired. The provenance of the second object on display—an industrial-green fibreglass lifeboat seat—that Boyne found in Alang is impossible to prove. It could have been from the Atlantic Conveyor or it could be from any other ship. For Boyne, it represents the ‘every-ship’ and the ‘future-ship’ as well as the Atlantic Conveyor. Within this space of possibility lies an interest in examining the opaque and complex practices of the shipbreaking industry that concern us all.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bb32fadeaec430678915fe8a4c77668c654aa3379faf0e9dc2360b0a10b0799a/page8Artboard-1.jpg)
![In general, the fortune of the shipbreaking industry is inverse of the state of the economy at large. Recession reduces profits from trade and spurs companies to retire cargo vessels for breaking.[14] After the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, cruise companies, too, have collapsed, and oil tankers are likely to be decommissioned. In 2021, the global shipbreaking industry expects a boom in business.[15]](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a98eeb7c23716a1c61661915019bf6fb526c7642134f0ca028f9da8b0fe8a7eb/page9Artboard-1.jpg)
