Stroom Den Haag

Stroom Den Haag proudly presents the group exhibition Beloved Waters. Five artists – Amanda Piña, Ameneh Solati, Kevin Osepa, Seaweed Etcetera, Zahra Malkani– present new work that focuses on water as a living being. The participants foreground this living element as a bearer of idiosyncratic stories, memories, conflict, and hope. Beloved Waters opens up space for a different view of water: as a site of ritual, mourning, and healing. 

The Netherlands has a long-standing tradition of water governance and management—an expertise closely tied to the necessity to control of nature, and an approach deeply entangled with a colonial past and its associated value systems. In Beloved Waters, the artists call into question this prevailing view of water. 

Informed by diverse cultural backgrounds, the artists give voice to alternative perspectives, forms of knowledge, and values. Drawing on stories from diasporic communities and indigenous cosmologies, they express these influences in new works created for Beloved Waters. The exhibition also features a spatial intervention by artist Johannes Equizi, who evokes associations with an ‘underwater world’ within the exhibition space. 

The artists in Beloved Waters invite visitors to reflect and dream together about new ways of living— with water, with one another, and with the earth.