WHAT THE WATER KNOWS
Featuring Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, Shunta Kimura, Hashem Shakeri, Sarah Cameron Sunde, and Gastón Zilberman
Curated by Ana Catarina Bizarro
Water is one of nature’s most transformative forces — life-giving and destructive, serene and violent. In an age of climate crisis, water no longer feels stable. Floods, droughts, rising seas, and melting ice signal both fragility and power, echoing the unpredictability of the world we inhabit.
What the Water Knows brings together five artists whose practices confront this shifting terrain. Their works reveal water’s role as both a witness to human vulnerability and an agent of change.
Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, The Blue Fig, Photograph, Satkhira, Bangladesh, 2022
Gastón Zilberman, Hashem Shakeri, Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, and Shunta Kimura turn their lenses toward the human and environmental realities of climate change. Their photographs document floods, droughts, and the fragile presence of communities living on the edge of survival.
Rather than sensational images of disaster, these works are quiet, contemplative, even melancholic. They remind us of what has already been lost — homes, landscapes, traditions — and what remains at risk.
Hashem Shakeri, An Elegy for the Death of Hamun, Photograph, 2018
In contrast, Sarah Cameron Sunde uses video-performance to meditate on time itself. Her durational works place the body in water, still and exposed, while tides and currents move around it.
These performances are not just endurance acts but reflections on impermanence and community. They ask us to think about what it means to inhabit time and space together, in a world increasingly defined by instability.
Sarah Cameron Sunde, 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, New York Estuary, United States of America, 2022, Performance duration: 12 hours, 39 minutes
Time-lapse video (03:04 minutes)
As Roland Barthes once noted, photography becomes “subversive when it is pensive, when it thinks.” The works in What the Water Knows combine documentary rigor with poetic sensitivity, registering catastrophe but also holding memory.
What the Water Knows is a meditation on the fragility of human life in defiance of nature’s forces. It is also a reminder: the spaces between loss and hope, destruction and renewal, are shifting with every action we take.
Shunta Kimura, The Chronicle of Us, Photograph, Gabura Union, Bangladesh, 2021
Publication
The exhibition What the Water Knows is accompanied by a catalogue, published in English by Henki Art. Featuring curatorial texts by Ana Catarina Bizarro, the volume offers critical reflections and visual documentation of the works presented.
Designed as both a scholarly resource and a collector’s edition, the publication illuminates contemporary practices that engage with the fluid, transformative nature of water.
Available through the Henki Art Store.
