Hudson River Museum
Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York
Rivers Flow / Artists Connect
February 2–September 1, 2024
Co-curated by Laura Vookles, Chair of HRM’s Curatorial Department, and guest curator Jennifer McGregor.
American artists from the 1820s to the present day explore and illuminate our profound, symbiotic relationship with significant rivers across the globe, from the Hudson and the Susquehanna to the Indus and the Seine. The exhibition considers these bodies of water through aesthetic, functional, spiritual, and ecological lenses.
Videos and sound made possible by Asia Society Museum, New York
From Her Hair the River Flows |
| Video installation Seven monitors (looped video, 2 min each); stereo sound (looped 10 min); printed mural; graphite on wooden shelf. From Her Hair the River Flows connects us to eight of the world’s contested bodies of water from South Africa through Americas and Asia to Palestine—The Olifants, the Ohio, the Mahakam, the Indus, the Ohangaron, the Rancheria, the Yellow River, and the Spring of Ein al-‘Auja. Expanding on her prior work, Mother River, Bahar Behbahani explores a visual and sonic experience that maps a transnational stream of changing ecologies marked by exploitation and displacement. |
The videos capture Behbahani's performative drawing, interacting lapis lazuli and ink, along with musical landscape by Afro-Polka Ensemble composed by Maciek Schejbal, and voice performances by theater artist Tara Ahmadinejad. The texts are sourced from the poetry of Etel Adnan, Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Anne Waldman. Behbahani physically inscribes a verse from Mahmoud Darwish's poem onto the shelf by translating his words through her body. Merging a series of videos into the mural–the trace of the archival image of spring of Ein al-'Auja, sound, and poetry, the installation welcomes us to contemplate the past, present, and futures of these rivers.