Eight Artists, Eight Bodies of Water: Oolite Arts Opens What Water Remembers This Week

Oolite Arts opens What Water Remembers on November 18, 2026, with a public reception. The exhibition — curated by Sara Cluggish and on view through February 7, 2027 — brings together eight artists who examine how histories are held, transformed, and transmitted through water.

The participating artists are Miya Ando, Ayesha Hameed, Adelita Husni-Bey, Saodat Ismailova, Lee Pivnik, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Juana Valdés, and Agustina Woodgate. The works span moving images, sound, textiles, sculpture, and works on paper.

The exhibition's central argument is that water is not a neutral backdrop. It is an active presence — a carrier of stories, bodies, materials, organisms, information, and memory. The works move across oceans, seas, rivers, rainstorms, canals, and other aquatic systems, connecting specific bodies of water with the people, histories, and environmental forces that have shaped them.

Miya Ando approaches water through the specificity of rain — drawing on thousands of Japanese words for rainfall to translate atmospheric conditions into meditative compositions of indigo, silver, graphite, and kozo paper. Ayesha Hameed's textile and audio installation follows the nineteenth-century undersea telegraph cable connecting Britain and India, tracing how communication infrastructure functioned as imperial control. Adelita Husni-Bey's video examines the disruption of Libya's water systems through extraction and environmental crisis.

The exhibition opens as Art Basel week approaches — a useful frame for work that asks what it means to gather in Miami, a city whose relationship to water is both its defining feature and its most urgent vulnerability.

What Water Remembers is free and open to the public at Oolite Arts, 924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. Opening reception: November 18. On view through February 7, 2027.