Please join us for the second day of the Waterways: Arteries, Rhythms and Kinship symposium, featuring performance, listening sessions, panels, film screenings and a live broadcast which can be listened to throughout Saturday, 19 October via Pan-African Space Station.
Morning Session: Léuli Eshrāghi: étude pour les sā and Tidal Resonances: A Listening Session
11.00–14.00, East Room, Natalie Bell Building, Level 6
Ticket required
11.00 Léuli Eshrāghi: étude pour les sā
A recitation of intersecting histories of the creation of the world and its recent unravelling, étude pour les sā, employs suʻifefiloi, cultural mixing toward a common future, to describe conditions necessary for Indigiqueer rest, restoration, and knowledge. The next temporality in the Siapo viliata o le atumotu series, étude pour les sā references the Solo o le Vānimonimo epic history through which all living things are related in balance across this ocean-majority planet, as well as mālamalama, ancestor veneration practices through which actions are understood to impact kin constellations.
Situated within and across the ongoing colonial faultlines of the Sāmoan Islands, the work speaks back to the unwanted impositions of protestantism brought by the London Missionary Society in 1830, and other divisions introduced thereafter, especially the Greenwich temporal barrier cutting through the Sāmoan archipelago. In gagana Sāmoa, the term sā can signify sacred, lineage, clan, but also signals fallow or jachère periods following a major disruption to a mnemonic place. étude pour les sā is a multilingual composition enacted facing the river Thames and Greenwich to the north and east, to remember Great Ocean worlds before and after.
11.45 Break
12.00 Tidal Resonances: A Listening Session
This listening session brings together artists working with sound, focusing on the connection between water waves and sound waves. Through a gently paced exploration, the session intertwines voices, songlines, and recordings that link the sonic, poetic, sacred, and political. We will hear works by Ayesha Hameed, Zahra Malkani, Ishmael Marika, and Bint Mbareh, exploring waters as Ancestors, witnesses, carriers of colonial control, capitalist pollution, and collaborators in movements for sovereignty.
Ishmael Marika’s Rulyapa invites us to listen to a songline that holds deep significance for the artist’s clan and their Ancestral connection to salt water of their country/lands. A songline is a mnemonic song that traces the journeys of Ancestors and spirits as they shaped the land, waters, animals, and lore. Rulyapa is deeply tied to the landscape, conveying knowledge, values, and wisdom that connect and anchor First Peoples to their place and identity.
Ayesha Hameed shares a sound piece from I Sing of the Sea, I’m Mermaid of the Trees, a body of work that offers a speculative underwater journey tracing the first seafloor telegraphic cable between Britain and India, established in 1870. Combining field recordings, composition, and poetic narration, the piece examines communication infrastructures as multispecies forms of colonial violence and control. I Sing of the Sea, I’m Mermaid of the Trees was commissioned for Liverpool Biennale 2021 and created in collaboration with Will Saunders.
Zahra Malkani explores the connections between the sonic and the sacred in Pakistan’s waterscapes. Through field recordings and readings, she invites us to listen to mystical and devotional practices, including lullabies and grieving sounds. These sonic records speak to rivers, lakes, and oceans, offering a form of resistance against ecological and infrastructural violence.
Bint Mbareh invites audience members to gather with the Thames and its tributaries, such as the River Effra in South London – driven underground and flooded with sewage. As we reflect on the ebbs and flows of these rivers as meditations on our own rhythms, can we begin to embody and become fluvial by emulating them with our voices? Facing the Thames, Bint Mbareh encourages the audience to speak, gargle, whoosh, yell, or remain silent, asking: Who speaks with the river? Who owns it? Who is responsible, and who drugs it?
The listening session will be followed by a Q&A.
Afternoon Session: Ocean as a Witness: belonging, ceremony, and desire and Rising Seas: Kinship with water in artists’ films
15.00–17.45 , Starr Cinema, Natalie Bell Building, Level 1
Ticket required
15.00 Ocean as a Witness: belonging, ceremony, and desire
Panel
Water, both fresh and salt, holds memories of Ancestral and spiritual lifeforces. It bears witness to history, of navigation and change, whilst carrying ceremony to cleanse, revive and restore the spirit. A power held through tides and currents for future generations. This panel with Léuli Eshrāghi, Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose, and Firelei Báez brings together artists that create works which hold these intersections of time, place and memory and consider the great oceans and waterways in the complex personal and cultural dynamics of past and the present and as a space to create change and political resurgence.
16.15 Break
16.30 Rising Seas: Kinship with water in artists’ films
Film screening
A survey of artists’ films on waterscapes and kinship including works by Lebohang Kganye, Sonia Levy, Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose and Angela Tiatia.
Bringing together multi-species explorations of colonial capitalism, seaside Black social life, light and song as carriers of family memory across oceans, and Pacific Island self-actualisation with water these films expand on themes and questions explored throughout the Waterways symposium.
Across the selected films we move from the submerged and turbid perspectives of canal infrastructures in the UK in Sonia Levy’s film Creatures of the Lines to aerial-view documentation of joyful Black social life with the ocean in post-Apartheid South Africa in Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose’s eBhish’. Lebohang Kganye’s Dipina tsa Kganya: Leave the light when you leave for good takes the lighthouse as a custodian of light to offer a cinematic meditation on healing and family lineage through song. Angela Tiatia’s The Dark Current, a hypnotic dream-like visual poem, celebrates Sāmoan cultural practices and knowledge systems in the face of rising sea levels that threaten Pacific Island communities.
Evening Session: Chimurenga, Pan-African Space Station
18.00–19.30, Corner, Natalie Bell Building, Level 1
Drop in
In this session, Chimurenga leads us on a voyage through different geographies, histories, temporalities and soundscapes to think about water through sound. They will dive into their expansive sound archive to create liquid soundscapes through music, speeches, sound artworks, film soundtrack clips, interviews, conversations, and other sonic offerings. The session will culminate in an hours-long broadcast on the pop-up live radio studio, Pan-African Space Station, thus allowing for a transnational shared listening experience. Join Chimurenga as they journey us into the politics, poetics, pasts, presents and futures of rivers and oceans, while cultivating an opportunity to collectively travel the waterways across time and space.
This event is organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational.
Participants
Angela Tiatia is Samoan and Australian, lives and works in Sydney. Tiatia explores contemporary culture through performance, moving image, painting, sculpture and photography, drawing out the relationships between representation, gender, neo-colonialism and the commodification of body and place. Often through the lenses of history, popular and material culture, addressing themes within power structures and how these impact the individual and their communities.
Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. She currently teaches on the MFA in Art at Goldsmiths University of London, is a Kone Foundation Research Fellow and Artist in Residence at the Camden Arts Centre and is Professor of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsink
Chimurenga, a pan African platform of writing, art and politics founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002. Drawing together a myriad voices from across Africa and the diaspora, Chimurenga takes many forms operating as an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection about Africa by Africans. Outputs include a journal of culture, art and politics of the same name (Chimurenga Magazine); a quarterly broadsheet called The Chronic; the Chimurenga Library – an ongoing invention into knowledge production and the archive that seeks to re-imagine the library; the African Cities Reader – a biennial publication of urban life, Africa-style; and the Pan African Space Station (PASS) – an online radio station and pop-up studio.
Bint Mbareh researches intersections in water and sound cultures in Palestine. She is interested in Palestinian ways of inquiring/knowing/making the world that are challenging to colonial ways of knowing the world, especially in proclamations around water scarcity, what is considered "cultural" as a way of researching and what is considered legitimate as a way of knowing. She opens the voice as a tap that mirrors the water bodies in our histories: it delineates time, speaks to the future, and defines temporary and productive collectivities - in this case often challenging the legitimacy of the Israeli settler colony.
Firelei Báez (b 1981, Dominican Republic; lives and works in New York) has had solo exhibitions at the ICA Watershed, Boston; the Mennello Museum of Art, Orlando; Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; and the Modern Window at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her major 2015 solo exhibition ‘Bloodlines’ was organised by the Pérez Art Museum Miami and travelled to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Báez was featured in the 10th Berlin Biennale in 2018 and was shortlisted in 2017 for Pinchuk Art Foundation’s Future Generation Art Prize presentation at the 57th Venice Biennale. She was awarded the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts in 2020 and in 2019 was the recipient of the Soros Arts Fellowship; the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; and the United States Artists Fellowship. Firelei Báez is represented by James Cohan, New York.
Ishmael Marika is a Yolngu filmmaker, director and producer. He is currently the Creative Director of the Mulka Project at Yirrkala, and seeks to promote the cultural, visual and performative practices of Yolngu artists through documentaries and other forms of film media. He has worked on numerous cultural productions for the Yolngu including documentations of dhapi, bapurru, and other ceremonial events. He is best know for his documentary on Yolngu land rights entitled Wanga Watangumirri Dharuk (2010), which has screened at many festivals as well as a private screening with the East Timor former President Ramos Horta. His second film, Galka (2014), a drama depicting Yolŋu sorcery, was launched to standing ovations at Garma 2014. Other films include Gapu Ga Gunda: The Art of Nongirrngga Marawili (2015).
Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in Johannesburg. Kganye is currently completing her Masters in Fine Arts at the Witwatersrand University; she studied Fine Arts at the University of Johannesburg (2016); and Photography at the Market Photo Workshop (2011). She is the recipient of the Deutsche Börse Foundation Prize, 2024 for her exhibition Haufi Nyana? I’ve Come to Take you Home, which took place at Foam, Amsterdam (2023). Other notable recent awards include the Foam Paul Huf Award, 2022, Grand Prix Images Vevey, 2021/22; and Camera Austria Award, 2019. In 2022, Kganye was selected as one of three leading contemporary artists to represent South Africa in the 59th Venice Biennale. Kganye’s recent solo exhibitions with newly commissioned work include Shall you Return Everything, but the Burden, Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne, Germany (2023) and Dipina tsa Kganya: Leave the Light on When You Leave for Good, Georgian House Museum, Bristol, UK (2022). A two-person exhibition Tell Me What You Remember with Kganye and Sue Williamson was recently presented by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia (2023).
Léuli Eshrāghi (1986-) belongs to the Sāmoan clans Seumanutafa and Tautua, and lives and works in Montréal, Québec. Their practice prioritises Indigenous, Black and Asian art, design, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices. Eshrāghi has presented major works at Cinéma Moderne, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Tate Modern, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Galerie de l’Université de Montréal, and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, among others. They have notably exhibited in The National 4: Australian Art Now (2023), MOMENTA Biennale de l’image: Sensing Nature (2021), 22nd Biennale of Sydney: NIRIN (2020), and Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber (2019). Their work is held in the Royal Bank of Canada (Sydney/Toronto) and Fonds régional d’art contemporain (Carquefou/Nantes) collections, and in private collections in Canada, Australia, and Norfolk Island.
Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose is an artist, curator and filmmaker. Nyawose is currently a PhD student in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, his research interests include: Aesthetic Philosophy, Political Theory, Critical and Postcolonial Theory, Film and Media Studies, Performance Studies and Environmental Humanities. Nyawose was the University of Cape Town’s Institute for Creative Arts Live Art Festival Curatorial Fellow (2022) and the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg and Wits School of Arts History of Art Department Young Curators Incubator fellow (2022). In the same year, he also participated in the TURN2 curatorial residency programme at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (2022). Nyawose was also the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Graduate Internship at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2019 and served as a member of the University of Cape Town’s Works of Art Committee between 2019 - 2022. Nyawose is a Foam Paul Huf Award nominee (2022) and the Hariban Award Juror's Choice recipient (2022). His work was recently featured in Der Greif magazine Issue 16 curated by Shirin Neshat (2023). Recent exhibitions include: the 13th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako - Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (December 2022 – February 2023), Indigo Waves and Other Stories – Zeitz MOCAA (June 2022 – February 2023), PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography (April - July 2022), eBhish’ KZNSA Gallery - solo exhibition (January 2022), eBhish’ blank projects - solo exhibition (July 2021).
Sonia Levy is an artist and research-led filmmaker with a Berber-Polish background. Her work, marked by site-specific inquiries, delves into the implications of Western expansionist and extractive logics, exploring how these forces manifest in the transformation and governance of aquatic environments. Her practice aims to probe the thresholds that shape and influence the conditions necessary for life to flourish. She is an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, School of Architecture, co-convening the collective How Like a Reef. Additionally, she is a member of the Steering Committee at the UN Ocean Decade Coordination Office on Connecting People and the Ocean.
Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist from Karachi, Pakistan. Collaboration, research and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice, exploring sound, dissent and devotion against militarism and infrastructural violence. Working across multiple media - including text, video and sound - she explores the politics of development, displacement and dispossession through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions or environmental resistance. She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies in relation to struggles around land and water in the city.
Conveners
Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta Yorta woman who lives and works on Wurundjeri/ Boonwurrung lands, Melbourne, and London, England. She is Adjunct Curator, First Nations and Indigenous Art at Tate Modern and Senior Curator at RISING, Melbourne’s international arts festival. Moulton was previously Senior Curator, First Peoples Collection at Museums Victoria (2016-2023). She works with knowledge, histories and futures at the intersection of historical collections and contemporary art. Her practice works to rethink global art histories and extend what exhibitions and research in and out of institutions can be for First Peoples communities and artists more broadly. She is currently a PhD candidate in curatorial practice with the Wominjeka Djeembana Indigeneous Research Lab Monash University. Her board roles include Deputy Chair of the Board Shepparton Art Museum and member of the Board for the Adam Briggs Foundation. In 2025 Kimberley is curating the Tarrawarra Biennale.
Marleen Boschen, is a curator, lecturer and artist working at the intersections of art and ecology. She is Adjunct Curator of Art and Ecology at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational. She is also a post-doctoral fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew with the research project Future Ecologies of Art, which examines botanical organisations as sites of artistic engagement. Since January 2023 she has co-curated Testing Grounds / Seeding Worlds, an artistic programme on cultivation, migration and agroecological learning for the garden of Villa Romana, Florence, with Elena Agudio. Her current research explores border ecologies, sonic practices, and ecological imaginaries.
Portia Malatjie is Adjunct Curator of Africa and African Diaspora at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational, Tate Modern, and a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Discourse of Art at the Michaelis School of Art, University of Cape Town. She is co-curator of Ecologies of Elsewhere and When Rain Clouds Gather: Black South African Women Artists, 1940 – 2000, as well as curator of the South African Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale with an exhibition titled Quiet Ground. Her research explores African conceptions of Blackness through sound, spirituality, and Black Feminism. Malatjie was a 2023 Yale University visiting fellow in the Department of the History of Art.
This event will be BSL interpreted.
For the East Room, you can enter via either the Turbine Hall entrance, and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner Street. The East Room is on Level 6 of the Natalie Bell Building, to the right of the restaurant.
For the Starr Cinema, via the Turbine Hall entrance and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner Street. The Starr Cinema is on Level 1 of the Natalie Bell Building.
There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Natalie Bell buildings. Alternatively, you can take the stairs. There is space for wheelchairs and a hearing loop is available.
- Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses.
- A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4.
- Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks.
To help plan your visit to Tate Modern, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information about what you can expect from a visit to the gallery.
For more information before your visit:
- Email hello@tate.org.uk
- Call +44 (0)20 7887 8888 (daily 10.00–17.00)
