“Thirst: In Search of Freshwater”

“This is now the task,” writes Sufi teacher, filmmaker, and editor of Emergence magazine, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee: “to remember that the worlds of spirit and matter must flow together.”1 If “the border of spirit and matter” is, for Vaughan-Lee, the location of the flow we need to follow in order to recover ancient memories from today’s amnesiac worldviews and recenter water within theories and practices of living, then what does it say about “Thirst” that both spirit and matter feel, if not exactly absent, then mostly muted or marginalized?

Across five sections (“Aridity,” “Rain,” “Glaciers,” “Surface Water,” and “Groundwater”), curator Janice Li explores thirst as “a universal human experience, shared with most living beings,” according to the introductory text. Fresh water, we’re reminded, is “the source of life and an essential pillar of good health.” Despite the self-evidence of such framing, “Thirst”, thankfully, contains many great moments. Artist Gaylene Gould’s Black Mary Project (2024–25) is a powerful combination of participation, joy, and research as resistance. Gould has worked with Calthorpe Community Garden to celebrate the life of Mary Woolaston, a seventeenth-century Black woman keeper of a well whose iron-rich waters were known for their healing properties. Meanwhile, a section on the Marsh Arabs of Iraq provides a valuable introduction to a unique culture. The Eden in Iraq Wastewater Garden project (2011–ongoing) seems, from this distance at least, like a beautiful attempt at cultural and ecological restoration rooted in indigenous traditions.

Elsewhere, the exhibition contains several fascinating examples of reuse from one cultural context to another. A deep-blue ceramic vase made in China in the seventeenth century was adapted one hundred years later in Iran with the addition of a decorated silver ice container to keep drinks cool for guests. Nearby, Arab Fluids (2025), a short film by research and activism collective LOTs, intersperses lines from Astrida Neimanis’s influential text “Hydrofeminism: Or, on Becoming a Body of Water” (2012) with filmed documentation of qanats, underground parts of a complex irrigation system installed during the Muslim rule of Sicily (827–1072 CE) and still in use today.

Amid a large amount of photography, film, maps, diagrams and text, where most objects are safely held behind glass, the artworks that embrace material vulnerability or sensory texture stand out. Dala Nasser’s Mineral Lick (2019) is a cascade of rust-colored fabric patches, soaked in water from privatized rooftop water tanks across Beirut. Karan Shrestha’s water-givers, memory-keepers, and the shifting forces (2025) is a large-scale ink drawing installation, accompanied by textiles, objects and sound, that combines swimming tigers, people fishing, crashed lorries, and monocrop riverside agriculture in a beguiling waterfall of multiple swirling scales. Nearby, the material residue from Lora Aziz and the Motanafas Collective’s Walking in Wadis project (2021–25) includes a short film, pots of herbs that visitors can smell, and a cabinet of photos, embroidery, drawings, and watercolors. Emerging through collaboration with local communities, it all points towards the artist’s rich and sensitive engagement with the hawthorn plants of Saint Catherine, Egypt. In the accompanying anthology, which includes beautiful writing by Joycelyn Longdon alongside more predictable choices such as Robert Macfarlane and Olivia Laing, Aziz’s text is a highlight.

Overall, however, in trying to navigate the entire planet from the Epic of Gilgamesh to various possible futures, it is unclear what “Thirst” stands for. One wall text acknowledges the impact of AI upon water demand, and yet it also includes maps of Sicily’s qanats produced by computational archaeologists using AI.

The exhibition’s lack of commitment is evidenced in the presentation of a single image by Palestinian-American photographer Adam Rouhana. Ein Aouja (2022) shows Palestinian men and boys playing in a wadi in the West Bank. The wall text notes the men’s joy despite “surveillance and threat,” which is quite an understatement given the decades-long and worsening catalog of violence by settlers together with the occupation’s military against the area’s people, the uprooting of olive trees, and the dumping of sewage into the spring. With no mention of this violence or who is carrying it out, the text notes only that, when Rouhana returned to the area in 2024, “this cherished scene had vanished.” The euphemism brings to mind “[...],” Fady Joudah’s 2024 poem: “The passive voice / is your killer’s voice.”2

In an exhibition that attempts to be both broad and concise, many important subjects receive cursory attention. One alternative could have been the maximalism of “The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind,” curated by Adam Sutherland at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in 2018, where visitors were left to navigate their own connections amid an overwhelming mass of material. Another might have been a much tighter focus. A brief discussion of meteorology as a colonial science, for example, could have been an exhibition in itself, rather than, as here, limited to a few maps and charts.

Nearby is a mahogany and brass water testing kit, manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome & Co (the pharmaceuticals company upon whose profits Wellcome Trust, the world’s fourth largest charitable foundation, was built) and used by British colonial forces in Nigeria in the 1900s. Perhaps a focus on water and colonialism or water restriction (and resistance) might have made more of the institution’s history, knowledge, and resources while addressing the exhibition’s tentative positionality.