SURGE, Call the Waves, Chapter Arts Centre 2022
Call the Waves was co-curated by SWAY and QANAT, held collaboratively by Francesca Masoero, Louise Hobson and Shayma Nader.
Call the Waves is a group exhibition and public programme which emerges from interconnected intimacies with different bodies of water. Grounded in long-term curatorial research in Wales, Morocco and Palestine, Call the Waves brings together an ensemble of voices, a polyphony of tales. Through underground waterways, springs, rivers and seas the artists, musicians, and historians in this exhibition propose a reclaiming of songs and stories, histories and futures.
Call the Waves follows the many ways in which we can think with and learn from water, emerging from investigations into the deep transformations and complex dynamics that shape our landscapes of belonging. The exhibition holds the reverberations of displacement and extraction as they are interwoven with destinies brutally transformed by colonialism and modernisation. In parallel, we summon the many waves of remembrance, and the intersecting underground channels of resistance that shape and share counter-imaginaries of existence across present, past and future. Attuning to the specificities of each work and story told, Call the Waves opens a space where the poetics of watery-words can articulate the making of infinite watery-worlds.
In SURGE, a series of works from artist Fern Thomas, you are invited to dowse different waters of potential. Drawing on the idea of territories of care, as traditionally seen in the model of the Parish diocese, Fern looks to the histories of diocese boundaries reaching out over the sea. Arising from a poetic text which calls on waters of consent, waters of unrest, waters of desire, waters of what is lost, waters of undoing, waters of steadfastness and waters of oracular visions, Fern seeks out the ancient future wisdom held within all water. The text forms a key for the floor-based sculpture which maps these different waters, above which is suspended a dowsing pendulum, a receiver and transmitter for approaching the water as an oracle. Fern offers the question, ‘What would happen if the waters within us began to rise?’
Call the Waves is co-curated by SWAY and QANAT, held collaboratively by Francesca Masoero, Louise Hobson and Shayma Nader.
The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme of performances, talks and workshops unfolding at Chapter Arts Centre and online, in dialogue with artists and groups gathering in Barry, Marrakech and Ramallah. Exhibiting artists Alia Mossallam, Bint Mbareh, Fern Thomas, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Maya Al Khaldi and Noureddine Ezarraf will each contribute events, alongside writers, researchers and curators Astrida Neimanis, Margarida Mendes and Sarah Shin. This programme will run across the duration of the exhibition.
This exhibition was commissioned by Chapter Arts Centre and the project is supported by the Arts Council of Wales and Wales Arts International.