Rethinking water: the power of art in enacting change

This research project enquires into the value of Indigenous contemporary art practice as a tool for inquiry on water and a means for understanding contemporary ecological challenges. While much has been written about water as a concept and object of inquiry for examining the relationship between water and society in the social sciences and humanities, and Indigenous artists have engaged with water and changing environments in their methodological practice, these have frequently been parallel conversations.

The urgent need for interdisciplinary thinking provides an opportunity for collaboration with contemporary Indigenous artists, curators and cultural institutions to critically rethink water as a concept in institutional settings, and how it is deployed and investigated in the production of knowledge. Understanding water in Indigenous artistic practice pushes back against the essentialist view of common water to address a plurality of approaches that respond to changing environments.

This project will address that need by bringing into dialogue methodological engagements with water in Indigenous cultural production within art institutions together with social scientists and scientists for rethinking water and the power of art in challenging and transforming the concept of water from an indigenous perspective.

The two workshops that form part of this project contribute to an interdisciplinary dialogue by providing an opportunity to engage with First people's connections to water, and investigate the methodologies, practices and methods of storytelling deployed by Indigenous artists, and professional curators and community organizations. The workshops reflect on the international Indigenous connections to water in the exhibition Naadohbii: to draw water which took place in Winnipeg (August 2021- February 2022) and Melbourne (September 2022 - December 2022) and brought together 28 Indigenous artists from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Investigating global Indigenous engagements with water in the Canadian and Antipodean contexts and how contemporary artists methods and artistic concepts may overlap or differ from each other, opens up the question of what water is and the role it plays in methodological practice for engaging artists, academic and non-academic professional, publics, and enacting change.