The Wapping Project, in partnership with Sharjah Art Foundation, has commissioned Bahraini artist Mariam M. Alnoaimi to produce a new work, focusing on the relationship with bodies of water within one’s environment, to premiere at Sharjah Biennial 16 in 2025. In July 2024, we have been awarded funding from Art Jameel and the British Council through Anhar: Culture and Climate Platform.
The Water that Asked for a Fish looks at bodies of water as living entities rather than objects within an environment. The recognition of water bodies as living beings is already embodied within stories and daily interactions in many local communities. Indigenous knowledge is inherently entwined with the natural environment and embedded within the practices and language of its community.
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 unraveled 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 a result of natural phenomena such as tides, storms and seasons, or human interventions: island building, land reclamation, creation of reservoirs, climate change.
The political border of Bahrain’s archipelago includes within it more water than land. Although this boundary has been relatively stable, the water bodies within it have been constantly changing. Climate change, rising sea levels, and rapid urban development, including land reclamation, have been reshaping its geographies of water. Alnoaimi has been looking at these shifts through a series of ‘Majlises’ (gatherings) and curated walks, collecting stories from those affected most by the changes to the landscape, including farmers and fishermen. The new body of work draws on this initial exploration.
Alnoaimi believes that the concepts of spatial systems, food systems, ecology, and social justice are all deeply intertwined and extend beyond the geographical and political boundaries of a country. Hence, her practice explores these systems and the chronological changes in geographies that shape current realities. Through a transdisciplinary approach, uniting participatory art, cartography and site-specific research, her work aims to reveal latent narratives within places, explore the notion of access and investigate socio-environmental justice present or absent from ecosystems both in natural landscapes and built environments.
Alnoaimi 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, including: the ritual of putting an eyeliner around an eye of a fish, wrapping its body with a white shroud, before returning it back to the sea as an offering; the tradition for a widowed woman to spend forty days of mourning in isolation from anything considered as a masculine entity, including objects that have masculine gender in Arabic language, after which she is guided to the sea to dip her body (the sea in Arabic has a masculine gender); the ritual of ‘burning’ the sea with palm leaves set alight by women who have pearl divers in their families as a revenge for their hardships.
The Water that Asked for a Fish considers relationships with bodies of water within the Gulf region – both contemporary and historical – and the underlining preciousness and fragility of these living entities that are complex and threatened ecosystems that sustain human and more-than-human life as well as culture, economy, traditions, social bonds and belonging. The project looks to inspire local communities and the wider public to take a slower look and observe bodies of water within their local environments and reflect on their meaning in their lives and their local, national, regional and global ecological significance.
