What Water Remembers

Oolite Arts Miami · Miami Beach

Exhibition on view: Nov 18, 2026 - Feb 7, 2027

Curated by Sara Cluggish, What Water Remembers brings together eight artists, among them Miya Ando, Saodat Ismailova, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz and Juana Valdés, who treat oceans, rivers, rain and canals as carriers of memory. Through moving image, sound, textiles, sculpture and works on paper, they trace waterways shaped by colonialism, extraction, migration and environmental change.

Miya Ando

Miya Ando is a New York-based artist whose paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations explore impermanence and time, depicting the most ephemeral natural elements, such as clouds, mist, rain and the moon, often on metal. Born in Los Angeles, she spent her childhood between a Nichiren Buddhist temple in Okayama, Japan, where her maternal grandfather was head priest, and a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. She earned a BS in East Asian studies from UC Berkeley and apprenticed to a master metalsmith in Okayama. Her work draws on the Japanese concept of mono no aware, an appreciation of transitory things. She is the author of "Water of the Sky: A Dictionary of 2000 Japanese Rain Words" (MIT Press, 2024). Her solo exhibitions include The Noguchi Museum, Asia Society Texas Center and Sundaram Tagore Gallery, and her honors include a 2012 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and a 2013 Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship.

Miya Ando. Photo by Miya Ando, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ayesha Hameed

Ayesha Hameed is an artist and writer born in Edmonton, Canada, who lives and works in London. Her work explores the heritage of Black diasporas through the figure of the Atlantic Ocean, using an Afrofuturist approach that combines performance, sound essays, video and lectures. Recurring motifs of water, borders and displacement reflect on migration stories and on the relations between people and what they imagine as nature. Her work has appeared at the Liverpool Biennial (2021), the Gothenburg Biennial (2019, 2021), the Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and the Dakar Biennale (2018). She is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. She co-authored "Visual Cultures as Time Travel" (2021) and co-edited "Futures and Fictions" (2017). Her textile and audio installation "I sing of the sea, I am mermaid of the trees" (2021) follows the 19th-century undersea telegraph cable connecting Britain and India.

Artworks in this exhibition

Adelita Husni-Bey

Adelita Husni-Bey (b. 1985, Milan) is an Italian-Libyan artist and pedagogue whose practice draws on anarcho-collectivism and critical pedagogy, producing works that bridge theater, activism and education. Inspired by Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal's participatory theater and workers' education initiatives, she often uses the workshop format to engage groups, resulting in publications, radio broadcasts, archives, exhibitions and films. Her projects address questions of race, class and gender through collective processes such as role-playing. For the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) she presented "The Reading / La Seduta," developed with young people in New York through a tarot deck she designed. Her ongoing work "Encounters on Pain" (2018–) examines how capitalist imperatives condition bodies. Her video "Like a Flood" (2025) examines the disruption of Libya's water systems through extraction and environmental crisis.

Saodat Ismailova

Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981, Tashkent) is an Uzbek artist and filmmaker who lives and works between Tashkent and Paris. She studied film at the Tashkent State Art Institute, continued at Fabrica in Treviso, Italy, trained at the Sundance Institute, and studied at Le Fresnoy in France from 2015 to 2017. Her documentary "Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea" won Best Documentary at the Turin Film Festival, and her feature debut "40 Days of Silence" was nominated for Best Debut Film at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival. Drawing on the cultural identity and history of Central Asia, often through ancestral knowledge and epic folklore featuring women as protagonists, her films and installations address memory, spirituality, immortality and extinction. In 2022 she showed in both "The Milk of Dreams" at the 59th Venice Biennale and documenta fifteen, and won the Eye Art & Film Prize. In 2021 she initiated the DAVRA research group in Central Asia.

Saodat Ismailova. Photo by Anvar Rakishev, via Eye Filmmuseum

Lee Pivnik

Lee Pivnik (b. 1995) is an artist living in Miami. He earned a BFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. Working across disciplines, he takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future based on mutualistic relationships rather than extractive economies. His sculptures, drawings and installations create a visual language for ecological entanglement, referencing fungal networks, epiphytic plants and the animal architectures of South Florida. He founded and co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology, a collaborative organism that has worked with more than 150 artists. In 2022 he began "Symbiotic House," a long-term project reimagining the home as a site for climate care and adaptation. He has received Knight Arts Challenge Awards (2019, 2021) and a Creative Capital Award (2025), and has held residencies at Biosphere 2, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Deering Estate and Oolite Arts.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz (b. 1972, San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an artist and educator who lives and works in San Juan and Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Working at the intersections of documentary practice and engaged activism, she combines aspects of ethnography and theater in film and video projects that blur boundaries between fact and fiction and explore the possibilities of a decolonized Caribbean. Her subjects have included anarchist communities, the relationship between artwork and work, and post-military land; in the mid-2010s she made a series of short films on former U.S. military sites in Ceiba and Vieques. Her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, the Guggenheim Museum, kurimanzutto, the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2022 Hawaiʻi Triennial, and is in the Whitney's collection. She co-founded Beta-Local, an art organization and experimental education program in San Juan.

Juana Valdés

Juana Valdés (b. 1963, Cabañas, Pinar del Río, Cuba) is a Cuban American multidisciplinary artist who migrated to the United States in 1971 and grew up in Miami. She earned a BFA in sculpture from Parsons School of Design (1991) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (1993), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (1995). Her research-based practice combines printmaking, photography, video, sculpture, ceramics, installation and performance to explore race, gender and class in the transnational Afro-Latinx diaspora and colonial networks of trade and labor. She has worked extensively with bone china, ceramics, maps, textiles and found domestic objects, connecting the movement of materials to the movement of people across oceans and borders. She lives and works between Miami and Amherst, Massachusetts, where she is an associate professor of printmaking at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Juana Valdés. Courtesy of the artist

Agustina Woodgate

Agustina Woodgate (b. 1981, Buenos Aires) is an Argentine artist whose practice studies the systems, value theories and power relations that operate in society, focusing on the politics of landscapes and infrastructures. Through sculpture, public interventions and social interactions, she repurposes available resources and society's surplus into works that propose new possibilities of perception. She is known for sanding maps, globes and bills, erasing borders and place names while leaving material traces of what was once there. Her projects have been selected for the Whitney Biennial, the Biennial of the Americas in Denver, The Bass in Miami, Locust Projects and MASS MoCA, and she has exhibited at the Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires and KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Her solo exhibitions include "Cosmética" at Spinello Projects (2017) and "Común y Corriente" at Barro, Buenos Aires (2016).

Agustina Woodgate. Photo by Diana Larrea, courtesy Art Basel