Water Witnesses (2025-2026) extends this inquiry into infrastructure, shifting from the projectile to the conduit. These sculptures assemble ceramic vessels, steel pipes, irrigation valves, and custom-cast fittings into upright configurations that evoke systems of flow, storage, and control. Drawing on vernacular water practices and the sacred geographies documented by Tawfiq Canaan, particularly his accounts of springs, wells, and cisterns as sites of belief, ritual, and guardianship, the works situate infrastructure within a broader cosmological framework. Canaan’s writings on amulets and protective devices inform the logic of assembly: materials are combined, bound, and suspended for their capacity to mediate vulnerability and protection. Within this field, the works operate as witnesses in the fullest sense of the term, where the Arabic shaheed carries both the meaning of martyr and witness.
Open Books (2026), texts by Tawfiq Canaan (1882–1964) and Gustaf Dalman (1855–1941), anchor the installation within an earlier moment of exchange between Palestine and Germany. Writing in the early twentieth century, Canaan, a Palestinian physician and ethnographer, and Dalman, a German theologian and orientalist scholar, documented everyday practices, sacred geographies, and systems of belief at a moment when rapid modernization threatened their erasure. Their work moved between field observation, correspondence, photography, and publication, forming an archive that continues to shape how Palestine has been studied and understood. Their pages, spread low across the ground, begin to resemble wings of birds, while also registering another form of circulation: the movement of knowledge through fieldwork, correspondence, publication, and translation. The books become part of the installation’s material field, positioned between archive and ground, text and body, sediment and flight.
Presented together, these works trace a movement from impact to flow, from projectile to conduit, from flight to printed circulation, producing a cosmology grounded in resistance, care, and collective movement.
