The impact of climate change is felt and measured most intimately through our experience of water, whether that be drought, flooding, or access to safe drinking water. It is no wonder that the climate crisis is also called a water crisis. That crisis disproportionately affects economically disadvantaged areas of the globe, especially the former colonies of Western imperial powers in the Global South. Despite countless news reports on climate disasters in the Global South where all of the top ten deadliest natural disasters of 2022 occurred, it is difficult to grasp fully the effects of climate change when the crisis hits communities outside one’s own.
Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis presents artworks that tell alternative stories of water experience. They treat water not as a commodity to be exploited but as a cyclical, life-giving, life-dissolving, and inert but innately alive spiritual force—a view widely shared among Indigenous communities, especially in the Global South. The exhibition juxtaposes older, traditional paintings depicting myths with works by contemporary artists that evoke various aesthetic experiences of water in the age of climate crisis. Water Stories encourages viewers to appreciate the multivalent meaning of water and to contemplate their own relationship with it.
LOCATION:Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall 8 Garden Street Cambridge, MA 02138 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230918T040000Z DTEND:20231216T050000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR