by Marissa Friedman
February 12, 2026
“ Nida Sinnokrot’s Water Witness stood out as one of the most compelling installations of the fair: a totemic assemblage of stoneware, steel pipes, irrigation valves, and scavenged materials that spoke eloquently to issues of resource, survival, and quiet resistance.”
Virginie Puertolas-Syn, “Art Basel Qatar and the Art of Slowing Down,” Artlyst, February 10, 2026
At the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, artist, educator, and ACT Professor Nida Sinnokrot’s Water Witnesses emerged as a resonant meditation on memory, ecology, and transformation. Presented as a solo project within the fair’s reimagined open-format structure, the exhibition positioned Sinnokrot’s practice in close dialogue with the fair’s overarching theme, Becoming: a framework that explored humanity’s continual evolution and the shifting systems that shape culture, belief, and meaning.
Art Basel Qatar departed from the traditional booth model, organizing the fair around focused solo presentations that responded to a central curatorial vision developed by Artistic Director Wael Shawky in collaboration with Art Basel’s Chief Artistic Officer Vincenzo de Bellis. Within this context, where the Gulf was conceived as a “living palimpsest,” layered with histories of trade, migration, and digital exchange, Sinnokrot’s work operated as both witness and agent of transformation.
Installed throughout carlier|gebauer gallery’s presentation (booth M206), Water Witnesses created an environment of quiet intensity and reflection. The totemic sculptures fused elements of industrial water infrastructure integrated with hand-formed clay vessels, custom sand-cast bronze pipe fittings produced in Sharjah, and pick axes that Sinnokrot re-forged into reversed forms, collapsing temporal and material boundaries. By merging the language of modern utility systems with ancient craft traditions, Sinnokrot traced the entanglement of technology, land, and lived experience.
Sinnokrot’s sculptures subtly invoking water as a repository of collective knowledge and cosmological frameworks, reintroducing those dimensions into the infrastructural systems through which land, settlement, and governance are organized.
By evoking ancient practices of guardianship and stewardship, Water Witnesses addressed the politics of resource control and land dispossession while resisting reductive narratives. The sculptures suggested an equilibrium between myth, ecology and infrastructure as intertwined flows of history and possibility. Within the fair’s thematic exploration of Becoming, Sinnokrot’s presentation underscored art’s capacity to translate systemic shifts into embodied form. His work stood as a reminder that transformation is shaped by infrastructures, both visible and invisible, that govern access, memory, and care. In Doha, Water Witnesses offered a contemplative yet urgent reflection on how histories of displacement and resilience continue to inform the present, and how art can serve as a conduit for reimagining futures grounded in continuity and renewal.
Above images: Nida Sinnokrot, Water Witnesses. Installation view: Art Basel Qatar, Doha, 2026. Photo: ©Andrea Rossetti.
Marissa Friedman: How did Water Witnesses come to be?
Nida Sinnokrot: The Water Witnesses emerged from an understanding that contemporary resource infrastructures have been weaponized, privatized, and severed from the cosmologies that once governed their use. Where justice is absent, art can operate as a protective aesthetic infrastructure that safeguards relational knowledge. In this sense, infrastructure becomes a site of negotiation, holding in tension technics and tradition.
But these works originated years ago from a longer inquiry into water infrastructure, traditional resource management and commoning practices in Palestine. At Sakiya in the West Bank, I was working within a semi-arid landscape where water access is restricted and rainwater collection infrastructure is often prohibited. That context led me to study both historical water systems and contemporary atmospheric water harvesting technologies.
For example, as part of my Art and Agriculture class at MIT, I was examining Dr. Omar Yaghi’s metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and passive condensation systems, alongside heritage practices such as zeer pots and windcatchers. I was interested in how low-tech, low-energy systems could create micro-climates without dependence on centralized power. Modular, ceramic vessels assembled in stacked hourglass shapes evolved from this inquiry, testing condensation, airflow, thermal draft, and surface treatment. In parallel, I was revisiting archival material by Dr. Tawfiq Canaan. Canaan was an early twentieth-century physician and ethnographer whose work systematically recorded sacred geographies, healing practices, and vernacular knowledge systems in the nineteen-teens. Canaan often exchanged medical treatment with Palestinian peasants, the fellahin, in return for permission to document and copy their amulets. The forms of these amulets, small, protective objects organized through assemblages and material juxtapositions informed my approach as did his documentation of springs across Historic Palestine. His 1922 study Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine catalogued more than one hundred springs, wells, and cisterns, documenting not only their locations but the social and ritual structures that governed their use. What struck me was how mythologies tied to water springs functioned as infrastructure. Water systems were not separate from cosmological frameworks or communal governance. Water Witnesses formed at the intersection of those strands. These versions do not harvest water but rather function on an aesthetic register. They operate as infrastructural propositions that reconfigure the material language of resource management.
Above images: Nida Sinnokrot, Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Old Jubail Vegetable Market, Sharjah, 2025. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin.
Friedman: Your work often unfolds across multiple sites and collaborators. How did Water Witnesses move from research into exhibition?
Sinnokrot: My practice develops across parallel research lines. Some connections are evident while others emerge organically through proximity in the studio, where formal experiments and conceptual inquiries converge. Collaboration is also central. It was through working with Natasha Ginwala on her curatorial contribution to Sharjah Biennial 16, To Carry, that Water Witnesses first entered a major public context in 2025. The works were presented as part of Sakiya’s contribution to the Biennial in Um al Einein (Mother of Springs), an exhibition that brought projects emerging from Sakiya into dialogue with the Old Jubail Market in Sharjah. The exhibition included works by artists who had developed projects through residencies at Sakiya, including a video by Shuruq Harb and collaborative banners produced with women and children from the village of Ein Qinya in collaboration with poet Maya Abu al-Haya, Michael Schramm, and former MIT students Gary Zhexi Zhang (SMACT ’19) and Agnes Cameron. That exhibition also included a monumental chicken coop sculpture, Capital Coup, which extended Sakiya’s inquiry into enclosure, governance, and collective organization, questions that now inform the current iteration of my Art and Agriculture studio at MIT.
Above images: Nida Sinnokrot, Water Witnesses. Installation view: Art Basel Qatar, Doha, 2026. Photo: ©Andrea Rossetti.
Friedman: So that’s where the chicken coops came from! How else has your work at Sakiya informed your teaching and research at MIT?
Sinnokrot: Sakiya functions as a land-based research platform but also as a methodology that engages indigenous agrarian knowledge as living ecological infrastructure that shifts assumptions about the separation of culture and nature. And that framework informs my teaching at MIT. In my Art and Agriculture course at ACT, we approach agriculture as a system that organizes land, labor, time, and value and ask how can contemporary art practice be leveraged as counter-operational systems, exploring alternative ways of managing water, soil, and community under shifting climate conditions.
This semester the Art and Agriculture course, Coop Culture, Co-Ops and Commoning, is cross-listed with STS and Architecture and co-taught with Kate Brown and Justin Blazier. We are working with two local farms, Eastie Farm and Common Good Farm, designing and constructing mobile chicken coops. The coop becomes a framework for examining enclosure, mobility, labor, governance, and community engagement. Students are designing for site conditions, climate, zoning, maintenance, collective responsibility, and for chickens of course.
Above images: Nida Sinnokrot, Installation view: Sharjah Biennial 16, Old Jubail Vegetable Market, Sharjah, 2025. Image courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Shanavas Jamaluddin.
In addition to the exhibition at Art Basel Qatar, there are two recent publications exploring Sinnokrot’s work: Horizontal Cinema: Apparatus, Land and Time in the Work of Nida Sinnokrot, edited By Bani Khoshnoudi, and Palestine is not a Garden (Sternberg Press), edited by Anthony Downey. Sakiya has also been named to the Art Review’s Power 100 for the second year in a row.
