for our time is the time of water

Athens, 21 January 2026. It is raining, raining hard. So hard that the streets are brimming with water, with nowhere to go, torrentially searching for ways to be absorbed into soil, but no luck. A city in love with cement and haphazard die-or-dare construction never cared much for the past, the now, or the future. Poor soil, hilltops with wasted trees, and water that gushes with abandon, dragging with it cars and debris to the sea. The hydrological cycle: water, rain, evaporation and the natural water systems, rivers, lakes, seas, oceans and their counterweights drought and desertification are all interconnected, a complex system of balances, now clearly out of sorts. Today, water figures less as a simple absence than as a volatile condition shaping our lives. It oscillates between depletion and excess, manifesting through harsh droughts, rising seas, and recurring inundations. And so as water cycles become increasingly fraught, here in Greece as elsewhere, our attention turns to the powers that instrumentalise water, that have separated these states of being as forms of control and extraction. 

For Our Time is the Time of Water is a gathering of voices from different parts of the world that suggest that the underlying governance, politics and motives for resource extraction and control follow the same insidious logic. This process, according to Dilip da Cunha, resides in the assumed understanding of “landscapes” as fields of vision made up of separate entities: trees, animals, rivers, oceans, rendered as clearly delineated independent objects.[1] He points to Western civilisation and its need to compartmentalise, organise and impose order. He attests, “we do not live on an earth surface, but we live in an ocean of wetness. We are wet ourselves. It is our wetness that allows us to participate in the world.”[2] He laments this enforced act of separation, between water, land and us, stating “there is no such thing as dryness, just wetness of various degrees.”[3] It all comes down to the drawing of a line, the lines that define, enforce binaries, encrusting a divisive logic on ebbs and flows. We talk of entanglement, a form of fluidity in between, while enforced separation is nothing less than a form of harsh extraction, radicalised through increasingly aggressive human interventions that have privatised coastlines, rerouted rivers, drained wetlands and fractured aquatic ecosystems in the name of modernity, security, and profit. So how to know the undefinable, how to extricate ourselves from this mess, how to understand that we need to rethink the very logic of the way that we perceive water on this earth. How to live in an “ocean of wetness”?

Taming Waters and Women (2024) by DAVRA research collective (Saodat Ismailova, Madina Joldybek, Zumrad Mirzalieva), examines these problematics, looking back to the infrastructural control of waters in Soviet era Central Asia as part of the regime’s economic drive. Drawing a literal line through the exhibition space, the work underlines the connections between water usage, enforced modernisation, resource extraction and female labour. It allows for a revisitation of the environmental and social consequences of a relentless drive for modernisation, with women pushed into the workforce and water being utilised for the production of a water-intensive monocultural cotton economy. Human and natural resources, exploited for the sake of the Soviet state’s economic ambitions, and at what future cost.

Jumana Manna’s Water Arms (2019) continues this tension between structural containment and flow, with ceramic sculptures that suggest a poor, handmade, fractured system of irrigation. As if disconnected limbs, somatic extensions, function like metaphors for imperfect water systems, and broken forms of control. They hint at how circulation binds human, vegetal, and mechanical life as interdependent structures. They “hold” empty space, where water should have flowed, as if water sources have long run dry. Containment is only necessary when something is there to be contained.

For our Time is the Time of Water asks us then to consider water’s politically charged histories, imagining futures in which what has been submerged can rise, reformulating our collective response and responsibility towards the vulnerable systems that sustain life. The exhibition echoes Vandana Shiva’s question: “To whom does water belong?”[4] In her critique of a current lack of a water democracy, she initially refers back to the Institute of Justinian, the codification of 6th Century law, which writes “By the law of nature these things are common to mankind – the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shore of the sea.”[5] In the same line of thinking, she reinstates water into the contemporary moment, continuing her thinking with a tone of urgency: “We are currently facing a global water crisis which promises to get worse over the next few decades. And as the crisis deepens, new efforts to redefine water rights are under way. The globalised economy is shifting the definition of water from common property to private good, to be extracted and traded freely.”[6] So who has the right to water? Who can its carriers be, and where can waters be allowed to flow free? 

As the climate crisis intensifies these infrastructural pressures, artists and other cultural practitioners return to water as a carrier of memory and a repository of knowledge. Alia Farid’s film Chibayish (2022) attends to the cultural and environmental transformations of the marshes in southern Iraq, a landscape where communities live in and off its waters and whose lives have been profoundly altered by state-led drainage projects, war, and climate change. Through gestures of daily life and oral histories, the film foregrounds communal memory and resilience amid the erasure of wetland ecologies and the fragmentation of water networks. 

Similarly, in Shahana Rajani’s work, Four Acts of Recovery (2025), we see community members from the Indus Delta, a geography submerged under rising waters, disorientating communities from recognisable landmarks that have vanished from view, tracing out their memories of the trajectory of waters. Marking past water formations is both a magical form of remembrance and a manifestation of hope, and a way of reconnecting with a profound sense of loss to ancestral landscapes and lives. Rajani invites us to participate in this talismanic practice, to sketch out a landscape or water source under threat, a coastline currently undergoing construction, a rivulet that has run dry, a thermal spring. Lines then, with different intents, those that define and separate, and those that touch, connect. 

Walking is another form of immersion. Dafne Lianantonaki’s peripatetic practice takes the form of both a “presence” in the mountains and riverscapes around Athens, but also as “witness” observing, photographing, sketching, annotating the waters and its land as they breathe in real time. Her work in the exhibition, Beyond the Mountain (2023-2026), is the result of an intimate and quiet coexistence with mountains and rivers as one, precipitation that enlivens soil, water and wetness as transcribed into the materiality of all life forms. 

Rossella Biscotti’s Stranded (2021) speaks of this form of physical amalgamation of matter through time. The work’s glass forms, as if shaped by tidal rhythms, light, and exposure, speak of the sea as both site and collaborator. The work treats coastal matter, stillness and movement, wetness and earth, as a fragile archive, where geological time and the legacies of extraction and pollution surface through materials caught between natural process and human intervention.

The exhibition closes with Ayesha Hameed’s filmic letter to her mother, Ilemuria (2023), where we are once again reminded of deeper mythological time zones. Drowned continents, cosmologies and mother tongues form part of a tale that is far more epic than human scoped chronologies suggest. Ayesha whispers to her mother, “we are in flood,” meaning both a fluid physical and mental state of being. For water is omnipresent, beyond and in our selves, as we are all simultaneously expanding, sinking, drying, evaporating into thin air, inseparable from water’s transformative state of multiplicity. 

For our Time is the Time of Water is porous with imaginings, incantations and narratives that are carriers of histories and practices that reflect on water as a fundamental generator of life. It looks to the past, critical of the now, with small gestures of hope for a future where water can be understood as a fundamental and essential right, a commons and bearer of life in its fullest form. For seas, oceans, rivers, lakes, rivulets, rain, evaporation, are always shifting states, changing form, as are we.

PUBLIC PROGRAMME

For our Time is the Time of Water public and learning programme brings together artists, illustrators, architects, activists whose practice concentrates on water and its urgencies, raising awareness on the multiple modes of water – whether sea, lake, river, rain. The programme will provoke conversations on the privatisation of sea fronts in Greece with its resource-heavy developments, invite participants to walk the mountains surrounding Athens allowing for an understanding of coastlines as porous margins interlinking land and sea, pay attention to Athenian rivers drowned in cement and the waters that filter through, think through increasing droughts and their parallel intense rainfall and flooding, invoke a fresh connection to water through community practices, nurturing workshops and poetic incantations and song. 

Saturday, 28 March 2026, 09:00-11:00 | Walk 
From the Peak of the Mountain You See the Sea
Led by Daphne Lianantonaki

A meeting on the peak of Panios, the highest mountain in Mesogeia. We climb to the top of a mountain to see the sea. We climb to the top of the mountain to drink fresh water, urged on by questions which have no answers (we think they are completely personal but in truth they are shared by all). Perhaps, the answers will be given by the mountain peak, in its very own quiet, eternal way.

Wednesday, 29 April 2026, 20:00 (TBC)| Performance
We are in Flood
Artists: Ayesha Hameed & Sofia Zafeiriou

Wednesday, 10 June 2026, 20:00 | Performance
The Choir for Non-musicians
Artist: Dina Amro 

The Choir for Non-musicians is a pedagogical tool that can be turned into any direction. In the case of learning about water, and its kinship with the people who breathe it, mythicise it, and know it like their own skin, we can imagine that the choir is a tool that changes the medium that separates individual human bodies from being made of air, into a medium that is made of sound, coming closer and closer to water because of the tangibility of the waves that separate (or integrate) us. The time it takes to get from one body to the next also suddenly changes when the voice connects the bodies, when the sound of the room is shared. Ultimately, The Choir for Non-musicians asks and learns about how to merge bodies using sounds accessible to all those who participate.

LEARNING

Map at the exhibition space
Athens – City of Waters
Illustrator: Eleni Papaskyrianou

A map of water sources in Athens by illustrator Eleni Papaskyrianou will be available at the exhibition space, to be used as a tool for educational programmes as well as for children and their carers to take home or to school. The map will combine mythological narratives, historical references, studied observations and anecdotal facts making the invisible water networks of the city visible and allowing a creative discovery of the ways waters circulate throughout the city, flowing from the Attican mountains, underground and overground, to the sea.    

Textile & work wear at the exhibition space
Horizon
Artist: Navine G. Dossos

Navine G. Dossos, has produced a textile art work, Horizon (2026), based on a photograph taken from her regular journey between island and mainland. The print of the sea horizon, distorted through rain as seen from a ship’s window, condenses mixed emotions: desire, aspiration, nostalgia. It also hints at the hydraulic trajectory of water from sky to sea. The sea as a carrier of bodies is transformed through Dossos’ design into work wear. The textile is part of a turn in Dossos’ practice where image-making is applied to wearables, following a long utopian tradition of rethinking distinctions between the making of art and the process of making and ensuring design is accessible for all. Horizon will be available at TAVROS by the metre or on request as work wear designed by the artist (trousers, dress, skirt, shirt, jumpsuit). 

[1] Dilip da Cunha, Decolonizing Wetness: It Is Where Design Begins, Habitat Research Center, 2024, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c95hRlbJNOU.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers, Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture, 2019, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39qJ3DKnPkg.

[4] Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatisation, Pollution and Profit (London: Pluto Books, 2002), 19.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.