by Lorna McDowell // Aug. 19, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Water.
At a time of extreme weather, environmental crisis and AI’s ominous and water-devouring rise, what can we learn from those most experienced with thirst? The exhibition ‘Thirst: In Search of Freshwater’ at the Wellcome Collection in London invites us on a sensory and political journey through the global dynamics of freshwater: aridity, rain, glaciers, surface water and groundwater. An institution known for its interdisciplinary exhibitions connecting health, history and art, the Wellcome Collection here turns its attention to freshwater’s political, environmental and social dimensions.
‘Thirst: In Search of Freshwater,’ an exhibition at Wellcome Collection // Photo by Benjamin Gilbert
Set against carefully lit, deep-blue walls, the exhibition weaves together historical artifacts and contemporary installations in a global exploration of water as a source of life, as well a site of conflict, vulnerability and resilience. Only 3% of the Earth’s water is freshwater, making this vital resource both a scarce necessity and inextricably tied up with power and inequality. Both living beings and landscapes thirst. This show invites us to connect with that primal longing through artworks that are both documentary and evocative of visceral, embodied experience.
The exhibition opens with ‘Thirst/Trishna’ (2025), a major new commission by Raqs Media Collective. This large-scale, multi-media work sits atop a low, sprawling plinth, combining sculptural and digital elements to evoke the architecture and mystery of the stepwell—a now mostly defunct ancient subterranean structure built across the Indian subcontinent to access and store rainwater. In the audio tour accompanying the exhibition, Raqs artist Monica Narula describes stepwells as both commonplace and awe-inspiring, their spiralling depths terrifying in scale. The installation mirrors this through shadowy, flickering visuals and a silver backdrop projecting a mosaic of skies and airplanes, suggesting the view from a pilgrimage into the depths of a well, looking up.
‘Thirst: In Search of Freshwater,’ an exhibition at Wellcome Collection // Photo by Benjamin Gilbert
Embedded in the geometric metal structure are multiple video screens playing fragmented footage: a bird’s-eye view of a stepwell, sunlit stone patterns, lush forests, shards of pottery in heaps of ash and overlaid newspaper clippings painted black and covered with schematic drawings. Snippets of poetry flicker in and out, accompanied by an audio backdrop in Sanskrit, forming a mesmerizing choreography that touches on myth, folklore, climate and geopolitics.
Overwhelming at first, the work slowly coalesces into a meditation on thirst as memory: memory etched in watermarks on stone and in the lives of those historically denied access to freshwater under the South Asian caste system. In 1927, the first major public agitation against the caste system was to reclaim the right to drink from public wells—a reminder that water has long been a site of both life and resistance. Narula describes thirst as a haunting that hovers above us all, and this multilayered installation invites deep reflection on the social and spiritual symbolism of these now ghostly, forgotten structures.
Gideon Mendel: ‘Deluge,’ five channel video installation // © Gideon Mendel
The uneven distribution of freshwater across the planet—and our hand in making that more extreme—is also a theme in ‘Deluge’ (2007–2024), a five-channel video installation by Gideon Mendel that zooms in on the dystopian catastrophe of extreme floods. Flood survivors from countries including Pakistan, Thailand, Australia, Germany and Brazil slowly meet our gaze in the wake of destruction. Submerged in their liquid landscapes, their presence is quietly confronting and dignified. The work evokes the flood myths of many cultures, in which divine wrath is met with destruction and renewal. Scroll through any news feed, and we can become sharply aware that more large-scale disasters like these loom on the horizon for us. Perhaps Mendel’s work can be interpreted as an invitation for us to take a preemptive glimmer of resilience from the human instinct, like water, to heal and regenerate.
Adam Rouhana: ‘Ein Aouja,’ 2022, photographic print // © Adam Rouhana
An influx of water can also bring fleeting joy and resistance in the most challenging of places. Adam Rouhana’s photojournalism work ‘Ein Aouja’ (2022) captures men and children bathing in clear, frothy water flowing through a wadi: a river valley that remains dry throughout most of the year, until heavy seasonal rains fall. They jump and dive into Ein Aouja, one of the largest springs in the eastern West Bank in Palestine. Children wear pink inflatables in the distance, in a dreamlike scene reminiscent of a childhood day out. With his body of work, Rouhana sets out to counter the one-sided representations of life in the West Bank, with scenes that depict the daily exuberance and communal love that also coexist there, even under surveillance and threat. Rouhana returned to this site in 2024 to find this blissful scene had vanished, underscoring the impermanence of water and the fragility of joy under occupation and ecological pressure.
‘Thirst: In Search of Freshwater,’ an exhibition at Wellcome Collection // Photo by Benjamin Gilbert
Continuing with more documentary photography, M’hammed Kilito’s long-term project ‘Before It’s Gone’ offers a sustained look at Morocco’s oases—once sustainable, balanced ecosystems now at risk. Nomadic communities navigate these landscapes using ancestral knowledge of wells, stars and the sun. His photographs show the contrast between life and loss: date palms and red-brick towns set against drying riverbeds and dead trees. One striking image shows a nomad peering into a well, minimalist, vividly coloured and surreal in its isolation. Kilito’s work reminds us how little most people understand about oases, aside from exoticized myths. It also confronts the exploitative imperial realities of global agriculture: water-intensive crops like avocados and watermelons grown for export to Europe are effectively exporting water from arid regions.
In a shift from the documentary to the bodily, Dala Nasser’s ‘Mineral Lick’ (2019) hangs grotesquely from ceiling to floor. Resembling skin or animal carcass, the liquid latex-covered fabric gleams with a slick sheen and sprouts salt crystals. Conceived in response to Lebanon’s unsafe tap water—due to corruption and environmental mismanagement—each piece of fabric is soaked in equal parts dye and tap water taken from Beirut’s 60 districts. The resulting patchwork forms a “hydromap,” bearing physical witness to contamination.
‘Thirst: In Search of Freshwater,’ an exhibition at Wellcome Collection // Photo by Benjamin Gilbert
During the exhibition of Nasser’s work at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut in 2019, the gallery closed in solidarity with those partaking in an uprising against government corruption. Heavy rain flooded the museum, soaking the bottom of the work—a literal and symbolic trace of infrastructural failure. Nasser’s work is both forensic and poetic. Water holds memory. And in its fleshy, gashed surface, the installation displays the wounds of failed governance that are carried in the undrinkable water.
The significance of glaciers is not forgotten in this journey through freshwater, either. Glaciers hold the largest reserve of the Earth’s freshwater, with two thirds frozen in ice. Susan Schuppli’s ‘Ice Records’ (2022) immerses us sonically in glacial fields, including those of Ladakh in the Himalayas, where Indigenous communities have a deep connection to the land and glaciers. Ice crackles and melts as glaciers and ice sheets recede due to global warming, taking with them an archive of environmental histories, as well as the freshwater reservoirs of lost futures.
‘Thirst: In Search of Freshwater,’ an exhibition at Wellcome Collection // Photo by Benjamin Gilbert
The archival material and museum objects offer solid, contextual grounding throughout the exhibition. While this can feel prescriptive and didactic, another, more embodied, journey is also possible and the artworks featured are given space to speak and to express our shared human experience of thirst, longing, joy and loss. The exhibition finishes on a forward-looking note from Raqs Media Collective, with an interactive AR installation that offers a virtual imagining of a future in which water-rich asteroids sustain human survival. But beyond speculation, ‘Thirst: In Search of Freshwater’ proposes that the cyclical, healing nature of water and its communities past and present, are what truly offer hope.
Exhibition Info
Wellcome Collection
Group Show: ‘Thirst: In Search of Freshwater’
Exhibition: June 26, 2025-Feb. 1, 2026
wellcomecollection.org
183 Euston Rd., London NW1 2BE, UK, click here for map
