MIAMI BEACH, FL — October 28, 2026 — Oolite Arts presents What Water Remembers, an exhibition curated by Sara Cluggish. Opening with a public reception on November 18, 2026, and remaining on view through February 7, 2027, the exhibition features Miya Ando, Ayesha Hameed, Adelita Husni-Bey, Saodat Ismailova, Lee Pivnik, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Juana Valdés, and Agustina Woodgate.

What Water Remembers brings together eight artists who reveal how histories are held, transformed, and transmitted through water. Moving across oceans, seas, rivers, rainstorms, canals, and other aquatic systems, the exhibition connects specific bodies of water with the people, histories, and environmental forces that have shaped them. The works draw from personal memory, oral traditions, mythology, archives, scientific and ecological systems, and material histories, returning to waterways marked by colonialism, extraction, migration, commerce, and environmental change.

Rather than treating water as a neutral landscape or backdrop, What Water Remembers frames it as an active presence: a carrier of stories, bodies, materials, organisms, information, and memory. Working across moving images, sound, textiles, sculpture, and works on paper, the participating artists examine what remains when landscapes change, histories persist, and stories move between generations and geographies.

“The exhibition feels especially important at a moment when water is inseparable from questions of memory, migration, extraction, and climate — asking us to consider water not simply as a resource or landscape, but as a carrier of histories and a force that shapes our collective future,” says Cluggish.

Miya Ando approaches water through the specificity of rain. Drawing on the breadth of thousands of Japanese words used to describe forms of rainfall, her works translate fleeting atmospheric conditions into meditative compositions of indigo, silver, graphite, and kozo paper. They invite reflection on how language, observation, and cultural memory shape perceptions of the natural world. Ando treats rain as language, atmosphere, perception, and emotional weather rather than a single meteorological event.

Ayesha Hameed’s textile and audio installation I sing of the sea, I am mermaid of the trees (2021) follows the nineteenth-century undersea telegraph cable connecting Britain and India. From the seafloor, the work moves to the forests of Sarawak, where gutta-percha was extracted to insulate thousands of miles of submarine cable, connecting communications technology to extraction and the expansion of British imperial power. The work shows communication infrastructure as a mechanism of imperial control and the sea as an archive of resistance.

Adelita Husni-Bey’s video Like a Flood (2025) examines the disruption of Libya’s water systems through extraction and environmental crisis. Drawing on a rediscovered photographic archive and a 2024 theater workshop at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, the work revisits the Jebel al Akhdar region and positions wells, dams, and other water infrastructure as sites of memory, control, and resilience. It also connects present-day climate adaptation to longer histories of technological intervention, debt, and colonial power.

In Saodat Ismailova’s film installation When the Water Turns to Wind (2026), the artist traces the disappearance of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, following decades of Soviet irrigation and intensive cotton cultivation. Moving through a landscape where water once structured everyday life and sand, salt, and wind now dominate, Ismailova weaves ecological loss together with mythology through the image of a fish transforming into a bird. It asks what remains when a body of water disappears, and how stories and relationships persist after ecological rupture.

In Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s 16mm film Horizonte vertical (2019), mythology and lived experience intersect through a Taíno story in which a star reflected on the sea is mistaken for a shell. The work explores perception, orientation, and the ways stories become embedded in encounters with place and water. Using analog 16mm film, Muñoz emphasizes film as a material encounter rather than a fixed narrative, allowing water, horizon, and sensory perception to remain in motion.

Lee Pivnik presents a photographic series made across Florida, from the Greater Everglades to the springs of North Florida, using water as a lens through which to examine changing biodiversity and the effects of environmental mismanagement. Moving between landscapes, signs, and traces of ecological decline, the works consider how altered waterways register the pressures of development, pollution, and shifting relationships between human and nonhuman life.

Juana Valdés’ Loot sculptures evoke the histories of extraction, commerce, migration, and displacement that have shaped the Caribbean and the Americas. Combining wooden shipping crates with ceramic forms, the works reference the circulation of objects and commodities across colonial trade networks while calling attention to the movement of people and cultural material across oceans. Loot treats the ocean as a route through which migration, commerce, exploitation, displacement, and cultural memory continue to reverberate.

Agustina Woodgate unpacks how geography is mapped, divided, and made legible. Her sanded maps remove place names, borders, and cartographic information while leaving material traces of what was once present. For What Water Remembers, Woodgate turns to South Florida, where the boundary between land and water has long been mapped, engineered, and transformed. Her selected 1900 Florida estate map shows the Everglades running from Lake Okeechobee to the Keys, recasting geography as something shaped by water, erosion, and memory.

The exhibition has particular resonance in Miami Beach and South Florida, a region shaped by porous limestone, the Biscayne Aquifer, the Everglades, canals, coastal development, and migration. Here, the question of how communities understand and respond to changing relationships between land and water is both historical and immediate.

“Oolite’s exhibitions create a platform for greater exchange — a space where local artists and Oolite alumni can be in meaningful dialogue with the national and global art world. Miami has an extraordinary artistic community, and exhibitions like this give us a particularly visible moment to bring those conversations together in our galleries, studios, and other spaces across the city.” says Marie Elena Angulo, Chair of the Board of Directors and Interim CEO of Oolite Arts.

What Water Remembers is part of Oolite Arts Exhibitions. Conceived as a platform for artistic experimentation and cultural exchange, Oolite Arts Exhibitions reflects Oolite Arts’ commitment to supporting artists while advancing the knowledge and practice of contemporary visual arts. Locally grounded and internationally engaged, the exhibition program, under the direction of Melissa Wallen, Director of Exhibitions and Community Outreach, brings together diverse artistic practices and perspectives, creating a space in Miami for critical inquiry, creative exploration, and meaningful dialogue between artists and audiences.

This exhibition is made possible by the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; The City of Miami Beach, Cultural Affairs Program, Cultural Arts Council; the Mayor and City Commissioners of Miami Beach. State of Florida; Department of State; Division of Arts and Culture; and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture; John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

VISITOR INFORMATION
What Water Remembers
Curated by Sara Cluggish
November 18, 2026 through February 7, 2027
Oolite Arts, 924 and 928 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, FL 33139

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Sara Cluggish is the Mary Hulings Rice Director and Curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College. A curator, writer, and educator, her work focuses on contemporary art, with particular attention to performance and moving-image practices.Cluggish previously led the experimental residency program FD13 in Minneapolis. She has also held curatorial positions at Site Gallery in Sheffield, UK, and Nottingham Contemporary, UK. Her work brings together exhibition-making, pedagogy, and research-driven programming through collaborative and interdisciplinary projects. She holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London.

ABOUT OOLITE ARTS
Oolite Arts is Miami’s leading support organization for visual artists. Founded in 1984, Oolite Arts provides studios, residencies, exhibitions, and funding to help artists while also offering art classes, cinematic programs, and community initiatives that connect the public to the power of creativity. The mission of Oolite Arts is to support artists and advance the knowledge and practice of contemporary visual arts and culture in South Florida. Oolite Arts creates opportunities for experimentation and innovation and encourages the exchange of ideas across cultures through residencies, exhibitions, public programs, education, and outreach.

Exhibitions and programs at Oolite Arts are made possible with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council and the Miami-Dade Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the Florida Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Arts Council; The Jorge M. Pérez Family Foundation at The Miami Foundation; the City of Miami Beach Department of Tourism and Cultural Development, Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Miami Beach Mayor and City Commissioners; the Collective Circle and SHE Collective members; and additional support by Walgreens Company. Oolite Arts is a registered 501(c)(3) organization, and all donations are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.