What Water Remembers

Moving across oceans, seas, rivers, rainstorms, canals, and other aquatic systems, the exhibition connects specific bodies of water with the people, histories, and environmental forces that have shaped them. The works draw from personal memory, oral traditions, mythology, archives, scientific and ecological systems, and material histories, returning to waterways marked by colonialism, extraction, migration, commerce, and environmental change. Rather than treating water as a neutral landscape or backdrop, What Water Remembers frames it as an active presence: a carrier of stories, bodies, materials, organisms, information, and memory. Working across moving images, sound, textiles, sculpture, and works on paper, the participating artists examine what remains when landscapes change, histories persist, and stories move between generations and geographies. "The exhibition feels especially important at a moment when water is inseparable from questions of memory, migration, extraction, and climate — asking us to consider water not simply as a resource or landscape, but as a carrier of histories and a force that shapes our collective future," says Sara Cluggish. Miya Ando approaches water through the specificity of rain. Drawing on the breadth of thousands of Japanese words used to describe forms of rainfall, her works translate fleeting atmospheric conditions into meditative compositions of indigo, silver, graphite, and kozo paper. They invite reflection on how language, observation, and cultural memory shape perceptions of the natural world. Ando treats rain as language, atmosphere, perception, and emotional weather rather than a single meteorological event. Ayesha Hameed's textile and audio installation I sing of the sea, I am mermaid of the trees (2021) follows the nineteenth-century undersea telegraph cable connecting Britain and India. From the seafloor, the work moves to the forests of Sarawak, where gutta-percha was extracted to insulate thousands of miles of submarine cable, connecting communications technology to extraction and the expansion of British imperial power. The work shows communication infrastructure as a mechanism of imperial control and the sea as an archive of resistance. Adelita Husni-Bey's video Like a Flood (2025) examines the disruption of Libya's water systems through extraction and environmental crisis. Drawing on a rediscovered photographic archive and a 2024 theater workshop at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, the work revisits the Jebel al Akhdar region and positions wells, dams, and other water infrastructure as sites of memory, control, and resilience. It also connects present-day climate adaptation to longer histories of technological intervention, debt, and colonial power. In Saodat Ismailova's film installation When the Water Turns to Wind (2026), the artist traces the disappearance of the Aral Sea, once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, following decades of Soviet irrigation and intensive cotton cultivation. Moving through a landscape where water once structured everyday life and sand, salt, and wind now dominate, Ismailova weaves ecological loss together with mythology through the image of a fish transforming into a bird. It asks what remains when a body of water disappears, and how stories and relationships persist after ecological rupture. In Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's 16mm film Horizonte vertical (2019), mythology and lived experience intersect through a Taíno story in which a star reflected on the sea is mistaken for a shell. The work explores perception, orientation, and the ways stories become embedded in encounters with place and water. Using analog 16mm film, Muñoz emphasizes film as a material encounter rather than a fixed narrative, allowing water, horizon, and sensory perception to remain in motion. Lee Pivnik presents a photographic series made across Florida, from the Greater Everglades to the springs of North Florida, using water as a lens through which to examine changing biodiversity and the effects of environmental mismanagement. Moving between landscapes, signs, and traces of ecological decline, the works consider how altered waterways register the pressures of development, pollution, and shifting relationships between human and nonhuman life. Juana Valdés' Loot sculptures evoke the histories of extraction, commerce, migration, and displacement that have shaped the Caribbean and the Americas. Combining wooden shipping crates with ceramic forms, the works reference the circulation of objects and commodities across colonial trade networks while calling attention to the movement of people and cultural material across oceans. Loot treats the ocean as a route through which migration, commerce, exploitation, displacement, and cultural memory continue to reverberate. Agustina Woodgate unpacks how geography is mapped, divided, and made legible. Her sanded maps remove place names, borders, and cartographic information while leaving material traces of what was once present. For What Water Remembers, Woodgate turns to South Florida, where the boundary between land and water has long been mapped, engineered, and transformed. Her selected 1900 Florida estate map shows the Everglades running from Lake Okeechobee to the Keys, recasting geography as something shaped by water, erosion, and memory. The exhibition has particular resonance in Miami Beach and South Florida, a region shaped by porous limestone, the Biscayne Aquifer, the Everglades, canals, coastal development, and migration. Here, the question of how communities understand and respond to changing relationships between land and water is both historical and immediate.