Where cloudy waters collide…

6 May-4 Jun 2022

Overview

Merikokeb Berhanu · Nasim Hantehzadeh · Isaac Julien · Abdoulaye Konaté · Tamar Mason · José Vera Matos · Alyina Zaidi

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present Where cloudy waters collide, a multimedia group exhibition exploring notions of rootedness, opacity, and sociocultural relation. Reimagining culture as a series of reticulated waterways - inextricably linked to flows of capital, goods, and labour - the exhibition traces the ‘subaquatic’ connections therein, coalescing around intersecting poetic and oneiric imaginaries obscured in the production of official accounts of the world.

The paradoxical nature of cultural encounter is embodied in the ambivalence of water, which acts as both a vessel for the poetic and a container for the tragic-historic (as echoed in the poet Derek Walcott’s plaintive cry that ‘the sea is history’). The fluid materiality and texture of water is one that can hold the ephemeral and imaginative - myth, reverie, and dream - and yet has also been an enabling force of conquest, domination, and slavery.