Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis

In this opening discussion for the exhibition, “Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis,” exhibition curator and faculty director Jinah Kim will engage in conversation with art historian Yukio Lippit and Radcliffe’s curator of exhibitions, Meg Rotzel. Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s exhibition, “Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis” (on view September 18–December 16, 2023), presents artworks that tell alternative stories of water experiences in the context of climate change. They treat water not as a commodity to be exploited but as a cyclical, life-giving, life-dissolving, and inert but innately alive spiritual force—a view widely shared among Indigenous communities, especially in the Global South. The exhibition juxtaposes older, traditional paintings depicting myths with works by contemporary artists that evoke various aesthetic experiences of water in the age of climate crisis. Register online.