Fluid Kinship is a global touring exhibitions exploring the interconnectedness between rivers, food systems, ecology, and human movement across cultures. Bringing together artists, scholars, and practitioners, the exhibition reflects on how waterways, knowledge, and traditions continue to shape our lives and collective futures.
The touring exhibition Fluid Kinship: Watershed, Foodscape, Human Tectonics is preceded by a series of research initiatives developed in 2024–2025 and documented in the publication Edible Cities, Mobile Rivers by SUAVEART. Bringing together six scholars and contributors from different regions, the research explores how cultural landscapes are shaped through diverse histories, geographies, and ethnocultural contexts.
The research outcomes will be the reading reference and presented together through a touring exhibition in 2026-2027, inviting artists and cultural practitioners to engage in archival inquiry and artistic experimentation. Together, we would like to examine how grains and historical cultures intertwine, accumulate, and transform over time, while also tracing the continuity and regeneration of riverine landscapes and traditional knowledge within contemporary local communities.
The research framework encompasses Iran, India, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Taiwan, regions that each respond in distinct ways to “rivers” and “grains,” understood both as conditions of survival and as the spiritual and cultural core of society.
Starting in 2026, the exhibition will expand into local communities, fostering dialogue with situated forms of knowledge and lived experience. Through experimental and visual art, it unfolds as a dynamic exploration of food, culture, philosophy, ecology, history, economics, and social systems. It invites audiences to reconsider the intricate relationships between nature and everyday life—from seeds and fields, to rivers and ports, and ultimately to households and streets.
Artists and cultural practitioners are invited to respond to the exhibition’s themes through their own ways of thinking, addressing present-day challenges, lived conditions, and the possibilities of working together across territories and beyond cultural boundaries. Each work is not a static display, but an extension of research itself: evidence of the ongoing flows between individuals and society, and between human life and ecological systems.
CHAPTER 1 Curatorial Framework
Rivers exist within temporalities far older than humanity itself. Flowing through deep time, they have shaped the contours of the Earth and the conditions for life to emerge. Rivers are not merely accumulations of water, but dynamic fields of energy; their movements and convergences constitute a primordial force that forms species, ecologies, and the spaces in which civilizations take root. Traversing mountains, valleys, and plains, rivers carry sediment, nourish agricultural lands, and transform the potential energy of highlands into the grains of the lowlands, enabling the development of farming, settlement, and technological knowledge.
Rivers are also organic matrices of landscape, civilization, and social networks. Their vitality is not linear, but rhizomatic — branching, entangling, and continuously unfolding. Rivers have guided patterns of migration and given rise to systems such as the Khazan embankments of Goa, India, and the collective water-temple governance of the Subak system in Bali, Indonesia, revealing profound intersections between engineering, spirituality, and everyday life. Within these pulsating ecologies, rivers are not rigid boundaries, but permeable membranes through which matter, energy, and forms of relational exchange circulate between land and water, humans and the more-than-human world.
Here, we return to a fundamental question: What is water? What is a watershed?
Water is approached as both material and metaphor — existing simultaneously across scientific, geographical, cultural, and psychological dimensions. The research team investigates water’s multiple ontologies, examining its roles within physical environments, symbolic systems, and human consciousness. Through this multidimensional lens, water becomes a medium that links scientific observation with spiritual intuition.
The invited artists further explore cosmologies in which water is understood not as a “resource,” but as kin. In these worldviews, water is regarded as alive, sentient, and moral. Drawing from indigenous and vernacular epistemologies, this inquiry foregrounds water as a living presence that continually connects humans, non-human beings, and deities through ongoing relations of exchange.