That our geological landscape is altered by man is no late-capitalist revelation. Lim takes the notion of the sea (and land)—as Karl Marx did with the commodity—to make visible the concrete and abstract processes of capital flow. Yet these processes are not simply concrete or abstract; rather, one is appropriated into the other—where the abstract processes of capital flow are concrete and operative in the lived present. Lim’s geological landscapes are not just ones that adhere to the spatialization of capitalism; they are marked by what social theorist Alberto Toscano described as an “indifference of concrete abstraction”—phenomenal for their ubiquity, scale and undaunted iterations. As Lim reminds us, in the case of the Jurong Rock Caverns, this is just phase 1.

In some ways, phase 1 is in conversation with the works of the late American photographer Allan Sekula, whose engagement with maritime space focused on the anonymity, isolation and persistence of its workers. Yet, Lim’s concern for the “hiddenness” of manual labor, both in reality and within social consciousness, translates less into labor’s political representation than depicting labor as it is, in the abstract, and opens onto a somewhat different critical terrain from Sekula’s. Strikingly, if the displacement of manual labor from social imagination is exacerbated by what Sekula called photography’s “imaginary temporal and geographical mobility,” this is precisely what Lim undertakes in the video work SEA STATE 7: sandwich (2015), as if to turn our attention from the histories of labor representation in documentary practices to the infrastructure of labor. Sandwich presents a horizon of land reclamation sites, industrial infrastructures, container ships and a commodified beach, each an individual scene that are laid out vertically and placed side-to-side and further “diagrammed” by the grid-like display of panoramic screens on which they are shown. Sea and worker are “cut off,” or minimized, as if the splicing together of their infrastructural, instrumental and operational elements was the only way to accurately portray both the sea and the site of its politics in a way that is adequate to our current moment.

It is worth noting that the diagrammatic grid is made a condition of viewing in many of Lim’s works—from phase 1, sandwich to SEA STATE 2: as evil disappears (2012), with the latter comprising two prepared charts that reveal the disappearance of the island Pulau Sajahat from maps to be as a result of land reclamation. It is as if both the sea and its abstractions obtain an imageability through the grid, across the page and the screen. If it recalls something of the modernist grid, for Lim this is never simply a visual system of modernist rationality and its expansions towards the infinite, as Singapore Pavilion curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa points out in the exhibition catalogue. Rather, what becomes of the act of looking, in our current political moment of total surveillance, seems best described in the strange, stand-alone island seen in SEA STATE 9: proclamation (2015), cut and pieced together from maps of Singapore’s reclaimed lands. Looking is not just subject to contortions and mediations—it also produces them.

Charles Lim’s “SEA STATE” for the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale is on view until November 22, 2015.