“WATER / ماء : Trespassing Liquid Highways” curated by Ikram Lakhdhar (APP '18), was included in the list of the best exhibitions in 2018 by Jadaliyya, an independent e-zine published by the Arab Studies Institute.
Jenna Hamed (APP '18), selected guest culture editor, wrote the review:
Curated by Ikram Lakhdhar, this exhibition presented the subject of water as a transnational grounding between demarcated areas of the Mediterranean Sea and the Caribbean. Edouard Glissant’s Theory of Relationality was used as an interpretative tool to intersect the histories of these bodies of water (referred to as liquid highways) being crossed by humans bodies—provoked by natural and human-made disasters. This exhibition challenged my conceptions of the impermeable nature of borders beyond the dissection of land, and how water is used as a tool to commodify the exploitation of human bodies for economic gain. More deeply, restricted access to drinking water and free travel are also bound to class privilege, human rights, and the larger discourse on liberation. The relationship of the artwork images to the diasporic poetry found in the catalogue—and the distance between the writer/artist and homeland further projected a matrix of relationalities, thus expanding on Glissant’s framework. Overall, this exhibition not only reminds us of the water that trickles into our everyday, but also of its use as a passageway into the exploration, creation, and destruction of worlds beyond our own.