Water Views – the exhibited works
Colours of the sea
The interactive installation by Valerie van Leersum (NL, 1973) invites visitors to imagine their memories of the North Sea by creating colour pallets. The colours are based on scientific colour systems as the Forel-Ule scale, which measures the biological activity in water through colour, and Werner's Nomenclature of Colors, a book from 1821 that Charles Darwin used to observe and describe nature. In her ongoing research, developed in collaboration with the Embassy of the North Sea, she asks people to capture their experiences of the North Sea by addressing their senses. She also envisioned how the colors of the North Sea will change due to the melting ice caps in Antarctica. In the gallery, she presents a textile piece The Color of the North Sea #2 //Talk to the Color of Antarctica, in which the colour palettes of the North Sea and Antarctica partially merge. The playful installation creates awareness showing not only how our inner worlds are connected to nature, but also how the effects of climate are permeating everywhere through water.
Testimonies of a river
Dead River by Tanja Engelberts (NL, 1987) shows how the Rhône, a once free-flowing river, has become a technological object. In a video with a poem and ceramic clay reliefs of the riverbanks, Engelberts lets the river speak for itself again. She investigates how to document landscapes that are no longer visible. With the development of hydroelectricity, the Rhône river changed drastically in post-war France. New canals took over the old river, dikes were built against flooding, the river was slowly dammed in the name of science and technology. With its fast flow and cool temperatures, the Rhône provided an ideal setting for the development of several nuclear power plants and chemical industry sites. The river became a hydraulic object; the boundaries between nature and technology slowly blurred.
Inspired by Bruno Latour's concept of the ‘Parliament of Things’, stating that laws and politics should respond to all things and life forms, Tanja Engelberts tried to imagine what it’s like to be a fast-flowing river, slowly filling with Anthropocene-era artifacts over a 600 kilometer stretch. Along its route from the glaciers of Switzerland, to the south of France and ending in the Mediterranean Sea, the river brings all kind of chemicals into the Rhône valley, such as PFAS radioactive material, plastic waste and pesticides.
Besides a meandering movie and a poem, Engelberts made photographs from the perspective of the river itself, focusing on the meeting point of water and riverbank. From the photos, she created ceramic reliefs with clay from the riverbanks of the Rhone. The reliefs have become symbols of the river’s hidden history.
Dead Zones in coastal waters
In the multimedia installation Dead Zones by Suzette Bousema (NL, 1995), natural, artistic, and scientific processes intersect, revealing how human actions on land have even penetrated in the seas.
Dead zones are oxygen-deprived areas in the ocean. In human-made dead zones, microalgal blooms in coastal waters are fueled by fertilizers from agriculture and other waste streams. When these blooms break down, all the oxygen is consumed by bacteria, leaving nothing for higher life forms. Over the past 50 years, the concentration of nutrients has risen dramatically, leading to an increase in dead zones in coastal areas worldwide. It is estimated that there are now about 500 coastal dead zones, whereas only about 50 existed in the 1950s. In the Baltic Sea, there is a dead zone of 60,000 square kilometers. In the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River feeds a seasonal dead zone of about 23,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of half of the Netherlands. For her Dead Zones project, Bousema researched the dead zones in the Dutch Grevelingenmeer by diving there herself. In her artistic practice, she collaborated with other artists and scientists.
Beggiatoa is a floor installation consisting of sandblasted glass plates with graphic patterns, on steel stands. The patterns are derived from the Beggiatoa bacteria, which grow on the seabed where oxygen disappears, and toxic sulfides begin to form. White patterns, resembling spider webs, act as visual markers indicating that the dead zones are being entered. The steel stands in this installation were designed by Johannes Equizi.
Written in Sediment is a series of handmade screen prints based on photos of sediment cores used in science to document the environmental history of an ecosystem and make future predictions. The sediment cores were taken from the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, both of which have natural dead zones that have been oxygen-deprived for thousands of years. Organisms, like worms or crabs, that usually stir up the sediment, cannot live in dead zone areas, because of the oxygen minimum conditions. Therefore, organic material from algae or clay from rivers will sink down and stay untouched. This results in a layered pattern in the sediment. Bousema collaborated on this part with paleoceanographer Rick Hennekam of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ).
For Water Views, Bousema created two window-sized screens made with sugar kelp from The Seaweed Company. Seaweedfilter explores the potential of seaweed to function as natural filters for excess nutrients in the ocean. Seaweeds are macroalgae that, like microalgae, absorb nutrients and produce oxygen.
Dead Zones is supported by the NATUURCULTUUR prize from the Fentener van Vlissingen Foundation, Amarte Foundation, Adessium Foundation, Stroom Den Haag, Mondriaan Fund.
Water as rhythm of the earth
The immersive installation Measuring Time through the Fall of Water by Areej Huniti (Jordan, 1989) & Eliza Goldox (GDR, 1985) prioritizes the interconnectedness of natural matter in contrast to the concept of exploitation, that has prevailed in dominant power systems. Viewers experience an immersive audio-visual installation, including a water clock sculpture, a digitally modeled water clock on a vertical screen and a video that functions as a manual taking the viewer through the ecosystem. By immersing viewers in a narrative woven by the intertwined entities of water, stones, trees, and birds, the work offers a shift towards an elastic territory that transcends the traditional boundaries of time.
The water clock sculpture can be seen as a contemporary reenactments of the ancient water clocks, a time keeping method using the fall and flow of water through vessels. The earliest water clock was found in the tomb of Amenhotep, who was buried at a time around 1500 BC. Early water clocks consisted of bowl-like stone vessels that allowed water to drip at a constant rate from a small hole at the bottom. Hours were measured using markings in the inner surface of the container.
The water clock installation has been inspired by technical drawings from The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, which documents the inventions by Badi’ al-Zaman al-Jazari (1136–1206), a prolific inventor and engineer of his time. Working with Al-Jazari’s scripts and drawings inspired the artists to engage with a way of timekeeping that is inherently relational and ecological, instead of the linear, accumulative logic of industrial time. Many indigenous epistemologies treat time as cyclical and intertwined with natural processes and ecological balance.
The act of reenactment itself, working through practice and material engagement also aligns with ways of keeping knowledge alive across generations outside of written, extractive traditions. Rather than enforcing a rigid segmentation of time, the water clock flows in accordance with its material conditions: water levels and flow, vessel shapes, and gravity. Time here is not abstracted or extracted but is physical, sensory, and in constant negotiation with its environment.
Portraits of tap water
The project Water Portraits by Jana Romanova (RU, 1984) is connecting the scarcity of drinking water to personal stories and a renewed community spirit. The project resulted in an installation with over a hundred posters and a book. While images on the walls represent a chain of one liter being reused 10 times, the installation in the glass cabinet gives a larger overview of the entire project, including more water re-usage sequences, recipes for reusing water made by participants, and the inspiration for the project.
"Water Portraits" is a story about our attempts to be mindful of using water and caring for those coming after us, told through the documentation of 101 ice sculptures. This project is a three-year-long journey in which multiple participants were invited to reuse a liter of fresh water sequentially. After each reuse, the remaining water was frozen and documented. This image received the name of the most recent participant and became their metaphorical portrait. This cycle persisted until the initial liter was exhausted and a new chain began. The process that involved over a hundred participants of the project, became a metaphor for how we treat water, how we think or do not think of others coming next, the passage of time, and the notion of temporary ownership of resources — told through the journey of one liter of fresh water.
Water Portraits is created with the support of the MIAP foundation, Stroom Den Haag, and Mondriaan Fund. It’s the only artwork in the exhibition not presented in the VU ART SCIENCE gallery itself, but in the art display cabinets in the main building of VU Amsterdam.
