The Wapping Project

About to open A Beauty Odyssey exhibition featuring new works by .michalowska.

Delighted to collaborate with

We are delighted to announce that our latest commission, in partnership with Sharjah Art Foundation, The Water that Asked for a Fish by Bahraini artist Mariam Alnoaimi has been awarded funding from Art Jameel and the British Council through Anhar: Culture and Climate Platform and is now in production towards its premiere exhibition in February 2025.

The Water that Asked for a Fish, a participatory programme and audio-visual installation, looks at bodies of water as living entities rather than objects within an environment.

Bodies of water – seas, lakes, springs, aquifers – can be seen as a medium of politics and poetics through which stories are told and narratives are unravelled into multiple layers of geography, ecology and collective memory. They are in constant change; their movement – the shift from presence to absence, or vice versa – can be the result of natural phenomena such as tides, storms and seasons, or human interventions: island building, land reclamation, creation of reservoirs, climate change. Mariam has invited a group of participants – fishermen, biologists, ecologists, writers and community members to respond to their local bodies of water within Bahrain daily over a period of time. The project weaves this factual information with stories and rituals embedded within the local culture in the Gulf region.

Image credit: Artist Mariam Alnoaimi and cinematographer Ling Lee during the production of The Water that Asked for a Fish. Image by Marta Michalowska, 2024.