Alia Farid: 2023-2024 David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute

Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis
September 18–December 16, 2023
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

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.

Viewed through the lens of climate change, stories about a celestial river that saves the ancestors of an ancient sage resonate with the reverence and respect sorely needed to recalibrate humans’ relationship with the environment. Drawn from the collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the Peabody Essex Museum, and featuring works by three contemporary artists, the exhibition illuminates the cultural, religious, and political significance of water while drawing attention to the legacy of colonial rule and imperialism to be found in the climate crisis.

Participating artists include Atul Bhalla (b. 1964, New Delhi, India), Alia Farid (b. 1985, Kuwait), Evelyn Rydz (b. 1979, Miami, Florida), M.F. Husain (b. 1915, Pandharpur, India–d. 2011, London, United Kingdom), and artists once known in South Asia.

Friday, December 8, 2023
12 PM ET
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall
8 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Join the artist Alia Farid for a tour of Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis and a discussion of the artwork Chibayish, 2023. Chibayish is part of a larger group of works that Farid has developed since 2018, focused on the impact of extractive industries on southern Iraq and Kuwait’s ecological and social fabric.

Alia Farid (b.1985) lives and works in Kuwait and Puerto Rico. She has had solo exhibitions in Kunsthalle Basel (Basel, Switzerland), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (MO), Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and Portikus (Frankfurt am Main, Germany). Recent and upcoming group shows include participation in the Diriyah Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Bienal de São Paulo, Gwangju Biennale, Sharjah Biennial, Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2001 in MoMA PS1, Yokohama Triennale, and Asia Pacific Triennial. She has forthcoming solo exhibitions in Chisenhale Gallery, Contemporary Art Museum Houston in partnership with Rivers Institute, CAC Passerelle, and Detroit Institute of Arts.

Alia Farid has a BFA from la Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico (San Juan, Puerto Rico), a MS from the Visual Arts Program at MIT (Cambridge, MA) and a MA in museum studies and critical theory from the Programa d’Estudis Independents MACBA (Barcelona, Spain). Farid received the Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award in 2023 and is currently the 2023–2024 David and Roberta Logie Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

See companion website for the exhibition.