‘Call the Waves’ is a group exhibition and public programme that explores interconnected relationships with different bodies of water. Through underground waterways, springs, rivers and seas, the artists, musicians, and historians in this exhibition propose a reclaiming of songs and stories, histories and futures. 

‘Call the Waves’ follows the many ways in which we can think with and learn from water, emerging from investigations into the transformations and dynamics that shape our sense of belonging. The exhibition holds the echoes of displacement and extraction that are interwoven with colonialism and modernisation. In parallel, it summons the many waves of remembrance, and the underground channels of resistance that shape and share alternative possibilities.  

Seine is a film installation by Kandace Siobhan Walker. Centring on the weaving of a seine fishing net, the style of net the artist’s father makes on Sapelo Island off the coast of Georgia (USA), Kandace explores ways of returning to indigenous knowledge through connecting with ancestral traditions. Seine looks to water as a site of resistance and revival, the shore a place for casting out and calling in.  

Aghmat is a series of drawings on fabric by Noureddine Ezarraf. This body of work considers how the colonial ‘modernisation’ of water management has altered various ways of belonging in Morocco. On fabrics dyed with locally grown pomegranate, eucalyptus, oak and walnut tree, Noureddine studies two bodies of water and layers the ways they have shaped land, agriculture, and water practices through time. 

Borrowing from the sonic qualities of whispers, Bint Mbareh constructs a soft chamber in which to listen to secrets – and possibly tell them too. Stellar Footprints draws on the astrologically-led agricultural systems of Palestine to explore how the sky imprints its secrets onto the land and how those secrets project into the future, replacing contemporary ideas of ‘sustainability’ with indigenous invitations to undo linear time.  

Drawing on the idea of territories of care SURGE by Fern Thomas looks to the histories of diocese boundaries reaching out over the sea. Arising from a poetic text which calls on the many waters of consent, unrest, desire, loss, undoing, steadfastness and oracular visions, the work seeks out the ancient future wisdom held within all water. You are invited to approach the water as if it is an oracle.  

Rawy al-Anhar (Quenching Rivers) is an installation by Alia Mossallam, which traces how stories travel through time, through music and through the streams of water that connect us. Exploring the marginalised histories of the Aswan High Dam that displaced more than 100,000 Nubian people, Rawy al-Anhar draws our attention to this history through the story of one family and the bodies of water they pass through. 

Maya Al Khaldi follows a thread through time and memory to create sing for them to see. Working with dislocated rituals and scattered musical heritage, Maya has reassembled songs learnt from the Maqam keeper of the Maqam al-Nabi Ayoub shrine. The spring, now locked, was once a source for communal washing, drinking and healing and sing for them to see reimagines the time when the water was flowing.  

Call the Waves is co-curated by SWAY and QANAT, held collaboratively by Francesca Masoero, Louise Hobson and Shayma Nader. The exhibition is part of a multi-site programme, located between Marrakech, Barry, Ramallah and Cardiff. This exhibition was commissioned by Chapter and the project is supported by the Arts Council of Wales and Wales Arts International.   

Listen to the Call the Waves audio flyer here.

Biographies 

Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, educator and writer based in Berlin. Alia is interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell the experiences of people behind the events that make World History. Alia has taught at the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Free University in Berlin, and she founded the History Workshops ‘Ihky ya Tarikh’. She is currently working on her first book as Fellow of the EUME program at the Transregional Studies Forum in Berlin.

Bint Mbareh is a sound researcher based in London. Bint Mbareh’s work with music began with researching rain-summoning songs in Palestine, and she continues to work with ideas of time bending, building and challenging settler colonial ideas of linear time. She has recently performed at the Mardin Biennale (2022), Mophradat's Read the Room Festival (2022) and Hoda Siahtiri’s symposium on Loss and Resilience - No Body’s Body ( 2022).

Fern Thomas is an artist from Wales, based in Swansea. Fern’s practice is based within the field of Social Sculpture with a focus on re-imagined histories, ritual, place-based knowledge and alternative pedagogies. She is currently a Future Wales Fellow with Arts Council Wales and Natural Resources Wales and Artist in Residence for Ancient Connections. Fern recently presented Spirit Mirror – a solo exhibition at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea.

Kandace Siobhan Walker is a Canadian-born Jamaican Gullah-Geechee writer and filmmaker. She is an editor at bath magg. She was a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and was the winner of The White Review Poet’s Prize in 2021. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Kaleido, will be published by Bad Betty Press in 2022. She grew up in Wales and lives in London. She is represented by Abi Fellows at The Good Literary Agency.

Maya Al Khaldi is an artist, musician and composer from Palestine, based in Jerusalem. Maya’s work explores voice and the music of the past and present, working with archival materials to imagine the future. She teaches music theory and voice at the Edward Said national conservatory and with a Terre Des Hommes project in Jerusalem, Palestine. She has most recently released her first solo album Other World.

Noureddine Ezarraf is an artist, essayist and a bricoleur poet living and working in Marrakech, Morocco. Through a multidisciplinary and hybrid practice, his work spans from research into the institutes interconnecting architecture and proxemics with the politics embedded in listening, to the iconologies and rhetorics of tourism as an hyper-colonisation of spaces and territories, especially in the context of Morocco. Noureddine also writes on Amazigh futurism. 

SWAY is a collaborative project in Barry, tethered to the town’s hyper-tidal waters on the coast of South Wales. Between an estuary and the sea, Sway proposes collective conversations on attachments, entanglements, communing and collective-making across the local landscape. With the spring tides of March 2022 SWAY began to host artists, researchers, writers and residents in multidisciplinary dialogues, public programmes and other activities in hydrological time at the shore. Sway is curated by Louise Hobson, an independent curator based in Barry. Louise is also Deputy Director of Peak Cymru. 

QANAT is a collective platform exploring the politics and poetics of water to reflect on, and act upon the multiple contextual configurations of the commons in Morocco and beyond. Drawing from the legacy of the qanat (or khettara) system of water harvesting at the foundation of Marrakech, QANAT proposes  to develop collective imaginaries to speculate on new spatial and epistemological configurations for the city. In parallel, it branches out to resonant reflections and actions in order to learn from other local struggles and knit them together into transnational patterns of solidarity and exchange. QANAT was initiated at LE 18 in 2017 by Francesca Masoero, cultural organiser, curator and researcher based in Marrakech. Shayma Nader is a visual artist, independent curator and researcher based in Ramallah. She has been collaborating with QANAT since 2017. 

Chapter Gallery is an international arts space that commissions, produces and presents contemporary visual and live art projects. We offer ambitious, challenging and wide-ranging programme of exhibitions, residencies, commissions and events by established Welsh and international artists.

This project is supported by the Arts Council of Wales and Wales Arts International.