Water/Bodies: Sa'dia Rehman

Artist and researcher Sa'dia Rehman surfaces the histories of power and displacement concealed within water bodies. Seen primarily as a commodity or landscape feature, water—aided by the human, geographic, and institutional bodies that attempt to control it—hides its complexity. Yet, across its different behaviors and forms, water constructs our physical, personal, and political landscapes. Rehman draws out the stories of these landscapes by paying attention to water’s material nature, and to its changing relationships to land.

Rehman’s practice springs from the history of the Indus River, a body of water flowing through Tibet, Kashmir, and Pakistan. It particularly engages with the cultural and environmental costs of dam construction, a focus that has emerged from their family’s history. The construction of the Tarbela Dam on the Indus displaced the artist’s family from their lands in the 1970s. More recently, Rehman’s focus has expanded to global sites, such as the Balearic Sea, California Mission Dams, and the Bagmati and Hudson Rivers.

Anchoring this gallery is a large site-responsive wall drawing that engages critically with the technological and racial erasures in Vassar’s founding collection of Hudson River School art, and with global histories of shifting waterways and dam-induced displacement of water and people. The drawing sits in conversation with other multimedia works by the artist, folding architectural and memory fragments with imagination and scientific data. Across this body of work, the artist pulls from their travel, archival research, and dialogues with family members, communities, scientists and environmentalists to ultimately perform an act of “re-surfacing,” in which disregarded histories of people, flora, and fauna rise again to repair and reform canonical histories and heroic narratives of water management.

—Azra Dawood, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs

This exhibition was made possible by generous support provided by the Mellon Foundation. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.