The Taste of Water

Water. Water has memory. It registers what happens to it. It seems simple and pure but it hides its dissolved memories in plain sight – histories of labor, pollution and colonialism.  Its flow conjures connections of discontinuous times of experience. Water is centrifugal and fugitive, it is in/around/within/without/below/along. Water leaks through territories. Moving through pores, bodies, communities and nations – water loves and conflicts. Water is an element of care in a time when land is the element of fear. Water is also a weapon, a conflict line, a surface that reflects geopolitics and shapes economies and climates. It is both a resource and a proxy, a venue for constant "friction" at the crossing of empires.

The Taste of Water is a site for multiple encounters with and around water. The exhibition is a leaky vessel, with artworks flowing in and out of the space. Propositions are realized elsewhere only to wash up on the Academy’s shores. As an exhibition, performance space, screening room, and ritual space, The Taste of Water takes cues from water’s characteristics – flowing, shape-shifting, non-linear – appearing as a medium and signifier, in the shape of sensorial sculpture, sound installation, video work and text interventions. Like the gravitational phenomena of rising and falling of tides, at times, the currents meet or diverge, forming a venue for non-consensual collaboration, swimming in mud, a place of sharing rituals, and olfactory witchcraft.

With contributions by: Mohamed Abdelkarim, Andrea Ancira, Angela Anderson, Anca Benera and Arnold Estefan, Berhanu Ashagrie Deribew, Soñ Gweha, Masimba Hwati, Hyo Lee, Rabbya Naseer, Vrishali Purandare, Francis Whorrall-Campbell