About This Event
Wednesday, November 18, 2026 - Sunday, February 7, 2027
Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 18, 2026, 6 - 9pm.
Oolite Arts presents What Water Remembers, an exhibition curated by Sara Cluggish, Mary Hulings Rice Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, opening Wednesday, November 18, 2026, and remaining on view through Sunday, February 7, 2027.
Works featured are by Miya Ando, Ayesha Hameed, Adelita Husni-Bey, Saodat Ismailova, Lee Pivnik, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Juana Valdés, and Agustina Woodgate.
What Water Remembers brings together eight artists who consider how histories are held and transmitted through water. Moving across oceans, seas, rivers, rainstorms, and canals, the exhibition connects specific bodies of water with the people and events that have shaped them.
The artworks included draw on personal memory, oral traditions, mythology, and archives, returning to waterways shaped by colonialism, extraction, migration, and environmental change. Saodat Ismailova’s film installation When the Water Turns to Wind (2026) follows the disappearance of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, after decades of Soviet irrigation and intensive cotton cultivation, weaving this environmental transformation together with a myth of a fish becoming a bird. Ayesha Hameed’s textile and audio installation I sing of the sea, I am mermaid of the trees (2021) traces an undersea telegraph cable connecting Britain and India, following its route across the seafloor and into the forests of Sarawak where materials for the cables were extracted. Juana Valdés evokes Caribbean histories of trade and displacement through her Loot sculptures, which reference the movement of people and commodities across oceans. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s 16mm film Horizonte vertical (2019) turns to a Taíno story in which a star reflected in the sea is mistaken for a shell, connecting mythology to her personal experience at sea.
Water is not simply what these artists represent. It shapes how we experience the world through dreams, reflections, oral histories, rituals, and embodied experience. Together, the works consider what remains as landscapes change, histories persist, and stories move across generations and places. The project is also shaped by its context in Miami Beach and South Florida, a landscape defined by rising sea levels, porous limestone, the Biscayne Aquifer, the Everglades, and waterways shaped by migration, commerce, and coastal development.
About the Curator
Sara Cluggish is the Mary Hulings Rice Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, MN. She previously served as Director of the experimental, residency program FD13 in Minneapolis; Curator at Site Gallery in Sheffield, UK; and Assistant Curator at Nottingham Contemporary, UK. She recently completed a fellowship with the AAMC’s 2025 Propel Program for mid-career curators. In 2022, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship and co-curated the major thematic exhibition Kingdom of the Ill across the entirety of Museion in Bolzano. Her work often bridges exhibition-making, pedagogy, and research-driven programming, resulting in projects that engage collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches and expanded forms of artistic practice. She holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.
On view in the galleries at 924 and 928 Lincoln Road.
About This Event
Wednesday, November 18, 2026 - Sunday, February 7, 2027
Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 18, 2026, 6 - 9pm.
Oolite Arts presents What Water Remembers, an exhibition curated by Sara Cluggish, Mary Hulings Rice Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, opening Wednesday, November 18, 2026, and remaining on view through Sunday, February 7, 2027.
Works featured are by Miya Ando, Ayesha Hameed, Adelita Husni-Bey, Saodat Ismailova, Lee Pivnik, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Juana Valdés, and Agustina Woodgate.
What Water Remembers brings together eight artists who consider how histories are held and transmitted through water. Moving across oceans, seas, rivers, rainstorms, and canals, the exhibition connects specific bodies of water with the people and events that have shaped them.
The artworks included draw on personal memory, oral traditions, mythology, and archives, returning to waterways shaped by colonialism, extraction, migration, and environmental change. Saodat Ismailova’s film installation When the Water Turns to Wind (2026) follows the disappearance of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, after decades of Soviet irrigation and intensive cotton cultivation, weaving this environmental transformation together with a myth of a fish becoming a bird. Ayesha Hameed’s textile and audio installation I sing of the sea, I am mermaid of the trees (2021) traces an undersea telegraph cable connecting Britain and India, following its route across the seafloor and into the forests of Sarawak where materials for the cables were extracted. Juana Valdés evokes Caribbean histories of trade and displacement through her Loot sculptures, which reference the movement of people and commodities across oceans. Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s 16mm film Horizonte vertical (2019) turns to a Taíno story in which a star reflected in the sea is mistaken for a shell, connecting mythology to her personal experience at sea.
Water is not simply what these artists represent. It shapes how we experience the world through dreams, reflections, oral histories, rituals, and embodied experience. Together, the works consider what remains as landscapes change, histories persist, and stories move across generations and places. The project is also shaped by its context in Miami Beach and South Florida, a landscape defined by rising sea levels, porous limestone, the Biscayne Aquifer, the Everglades, and waterways shaped by migration, commerce, and coastal development.
About the Curator
Sara Cluggish is the Mary Hulings Rice Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College, MN. She previously served as Director of the experimental, residency program FD13 in Minneapolis; Curator at Site Gallery in Sheffield, UK; and Assistant Curator at Nottingham Contemporary, UK. She recently completed a fellowship with the AAMC’s 2025 Propel Program for mid-career curators. In 2022, she was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship and co-curated the major thematic exhibition Kingdom of the Ill across the entirety of Museion in Bolzano. Her work often bridges exhibition-making, pedagogy, and research-driven programming, resulting in projects that engage collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches and expanded forms of artistic practice. She holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.
On view in the galleries at 924 and 928 Lincoln Road.