Between Rivers

With: Alex Ayed, Hicham Berrada, Anna Boghiguian, Reena Saini Kallat, Zoe Leonard, Cato Løland, Delcy Morelos, Senga Nengudi, Thao Nguyen Phan, Marjetica Potrč, Lala Rukh, James Webb

Between Rivers brings together the practices of contemporary artists who respond to the place of rivers in our lives at a moment when they are being profoundly reshaped by human activity. While rivers have been an important subject for artists since at least the nineteenth century and are at the center of significant developments in fields as varied as sociology, political organization, and the built environment, in recent years they have been discussed with an increasing urgency. Reports of major rivers dropping to their lowest levels on record have appeared alongside accounts of atmosphe­ric rivers causing severe flooding. Systems that are crucial to the functioning of our contemporary world, such as the production of hydroelectricity, food security, and global transportation networks, are being profoundly impacted. Simultaneously, the recognition of indigenous definitions of rivers, and the expansion of scientific and legal ones, are changing what we mean by the term. 

The artists included in Between Rivers propose new ways of reading and imagining rivers. While many of the works are characterized by modes of expression that are particular to each artist’s practice—perhaps unsurprising given the challenge of representing a subject that is at once fixed and relentlessly in motion—they are nonetheless related by the image, process, or material of a river. 

Several of the works, including those by Zeo Leonard, Marjetica Potrč, and Thao Nguyen Phan, directly reference significant river systems. They examine the subject’s entanglement with territory and identity, resource extraction, and religious or folkloric symbols and narratives. Cato Løland and Senga Nengudi respond to rivers more obliquely. Its characteristics are a catalyst for the creation of new work or a framing device to understand a practice differently. The histories of people and objects that have transited across these bodies of water, are present in the work of Alex Ayed, Anna Boghiguian, Reena Saini Kallat and James Webb. The material of a river and what gathers next to it—its liquid body, the soil along its banks, and the plants that grow there—form the materials used in Delcy Morelos and Hicham Berrada’s installations. Lala Rukh’s drawings on photographic paper, which close the exhibition, distill an acute vision that is at once meditative and persistent. It was never far from the complex social environment she inhabited and sought to change. 

A public program will accompany the exhibition, including conversations with artists and leading scholars, a film screening, and the presentation of a performance. In addition to the exhibition itself, these interventions will be documented so that they can be shared via Astrup Fearnley Museet’s multiple digital channels. 

Curated by Owen Martin.