by Alison Hugill // July 1, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Water.
While ‘Water’ might just seem like a refreshing topic for summer, especially as we’re launching into Berlin’s first major heatwave of the year, its meanings in contemporary art and theory are more circumspect, with references drawing from texts like Astrida Neimanis’ ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’ and Kamau Braithwaite’s more poetic notion of “tidalectics,” a postcolonial reconceptualization of Hegel’s dialectics. On the level of daily impact, water resources have become an increasingly frequent point of conversation with the advent of widespread AI usage and its notorious over-consumption, and amid ongoing extreme weather leading to droughts and floods across the globe.
In her essay on hydrofeminism, Neimanis begins with the proposition that “we are all bodies of water.” Eschewing dominant western metaphysics, Neimanis goes on to suggest that, by considering ourselves as “watery,” we experience ourselves “less as isolated entities, and more as oceanic eddies.” The “hydro-logics” that she lays out offer us new possibilities for connection and new understandings of ourselves within a feminist paradigm. Relatedly, the slogan “Water is Life” has been recently re-popularized by various eco-activists and Indigenous groups attempting to foreground the importance of water in the future of our planet.
Patricia Domínguez: ‘THE BALLAD OF THE DRY MERMAIDS,’ 2020, installation view at C3A Córdoba, 2022 // Photo by Fernando Sendra, courtesy of the artist, commissioned and produced by TBA21 for How to Tread Lightly, Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, 2020
In her recently opened solo exhibition ‘Liquid Mantras’ at Kunstverein Arnsberg—which appears in the context of the museum’s ongoing project on “Swamping”—Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez reflects on this particular angle, diving into differences in access to water, its privatization and commercialization. She looks at forms of weeping and healing with regard to rituals, spirituality and resilience and her artworks mix digital and real responses to the rapid loss of water as a natural resource. Adela Lovric visited the exhibition, learning more about the Indigenous forms of resistance and regeneration that Domínguez draws upon for the show.
‘Tributaries: a Wet Ritual for Witnessing’ // Photo by Richard Rivera
In an upcoming interview with William Kherbek, artists Sophie Seita and Naomi Woo discuss their recent collaborative project ‘Tributaries: a Wet Ritual for Witnessing,’ which considers the central role water plays in the forging, and the undermining, of social bonds. For the project, groups gather near bodies of water to consider the ways in which it is used, preserved and abused in contemporary life and across various interlocking histories.
In another example of community-oriented art practice, London-based art collective Cooking Sections will open the ‘Ministry of Sewers’ this month at the Folkestone Triennial in the eponymous Kentish seaside town. Residents, swimmers, farmers and Triennial visitors, among others, are invited to book a free session with a “Sewer Minister” to voice their concerns, share experiences, bring evidence and add their testimony to the ‘Log of Grievances’—a growing living archive of water degradation along the Kent coast. Contributor Juan José Santos Mateo speaks to them about how they plan to tackle the issue of water pollution through this artistic intervention.
Cooking Sections: ‘Ministry of Sewers,’ Call Out Poster, No Crops and Bleeds, Sick of the Sewers // Courtesy of the artists
For another review, Annalisa Giacinti visited the current exhibition ‘Der Fluss bin ich’ in Paderborn, which is dedicated to the river Pader and its significance for the city. The artworks presented along the river, which is the shortest in Germany and only flows within the city of Paderborn, deal with questions about its rights as an equal citizen, as well as its role as a feature of urban life. Meanwhile, at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, Canadian artist David Hartt shows a new temporary artwork created for the garden of the museum, entitled ‘Metabolic Rift,’ a concept of Marxist ecology formulated by the sociologist John Bellamy Foster as a critique of capitalism. In the show, the story of Kolbe’s ‘Dancer’s Fountain’ (1922), on view in the garden, comes to life through Hartt’s artistic contemplation about the interconnected relations between culture and environment, periphery and center, Heimat and estrangement. Carolin Kralapp will review the exhibition, which runs throughout the summer months.
In the end, water is, indeed, life and as such its political dimensions are far reaching and its metaphorical possibilities highly elastic, making it an ideal subject for contemporary art and poetry, as well as more tangible community-based and activist projects that deal with its preservation.
Jeppe Hein: ‘Did I miss something,’ 2001, installation view ‘Tatort Paderborn 2025: Der Fluss bin ich’ // Photo by Hanna Neander, courtesy of Jeppe Hein, KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin; 303 GALLERY, New York and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen
