ABOUT

Water Stories is an exhibition on the climate crisis being held at the Johnson Kulukundis Family Gallery at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (September 18 — December 16, 2023). Drawn from the collections of the Harvard Art Museums and the Peabody Essex Museum, and with works by three contemporary artists, this exhibition presents artworks that tell alternate stories of water as a cyclical, life-giving, life-dissolving, inert but innately alive, spiritual force—a notion shared widely among indigenous communities, especially in the Global South. As an essential element, water may be everywhere, but how we see and understand water is not universal. What color is water, where and how does it appear? How do you understand and share your visceral experience of water? The works in this exhibition show how various forms of water take shape through artists’ visions and material interventions, highlighting art’s role in addressing challenges of the anthropogenic climate crisis.

The exhibition is curated by Jinah Kim, Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director in the Arts at Harvard Radcliffe Institute with the help from Meg Rotzel, Joe Zane, and Toby Wu. During the early stage of developing the exhibition, the world witnessed a catastrophic climate disaster in Pakistan (2022 Pakistani flood), which affirmed Kim’s resolution to pursue the exhibition’s focus on water. Developed in lieu of a print publication, this website is designed to meet three goals: 1) providing virtual access to the exhibition with additional information and essays, 2) serving as a portal to share personal and individual stories in a map, and 3) enhancing climate literacy through curated resources. The website was designed by Cara Buzell and built by DARTH (the Arts and Humanities Research computing team). We thank the Arts and Humanities Dean’s office and DARTH for their timely support. We are also grateful for the support of the Harvard Art Museums and the Peabody Essex Museum: generous loans from these institutions made the exhibition possible. (In-person visitors to the gallery will find more water-themed exhibitions at the Harvard Art Museums’ permanent galleries put together by that Museum’s curator Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım.) The exhibition would have not been possible without the institutional support from the Radcliffe institute—in particular, we thank Rebecca Wassarman and Don Tontiplaphol of the Academic Ventures and Engagement. In preparation for the exhibition, Jinah Kim traveled to India in December 2022 with two graduate students from Harvard, Victoria Andrews and Raghunath Akarsh and visited several important pilgrimage sites along the river observing and documenting ritual activities of people around the river Ganga. Kim is grateful to Victoria and Akarsh for their support.

The authors of the text on this website include Jinah Kim (JK), Toby Wu (TW), Raghunath Akarsh (RA), Victoria Andrews (VA) and Vaishnavi Patil (VP).

Jinah Kim

Jinah Kim is the George P. Bickford Professor of Indian and South Asian Art and Professor of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests cover diverse topics such as text-image relationships, female representations and patronage, re-appropriation of sacred objects, and post-colonial discourse in the field of South and Southeast Asian Art. In addition to her academic research, she directs a digital humanities project on color and pigments in painting, "Mapping Color in History," which serves as a knowledge common for conservation specialists as well as anyone interested in material aspects of color, with a searchable, open database for historical research on pigments. She co-curated an NEH-funded exhibition on Nepalese Buddhist Ritual art. She is currently the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director in the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the faculty director of the Arts program at the Mittal Institute.

Toby Wu

Toby Wu is a writer and PhD Student in the department of Art, Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. He researches Contemporary Art, through the Transpacific, elemental media theory and the environmental humanities. Toby holds degrees from the University of Chicago and Nanyang Technological University. He has worked in curatorial and research positions at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art and the National Gallery Singapore. His criticism, interviews and profiles of artists can be found in Senses of Cinema, Boston Art Review, Millennium Film Journal and Art & Market. Toby was an inaugural Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation Curatorial Fellow (2022), a Flaherty Seminar Curatorial Fellow (2022) and an inaugural Asia Art Archive in America & PoNJA GenKon Fellow (2021).

Raghunath Akarsh

Raghunath Akarsh is a PhD candidate at the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. He studies the trans-regional interactions of Hindu and Buddhist material culture across the Indian Ocean with a focus on locating Tamiḻakam in the South-Southeast Asian encounters of Southern Buddhism. His research interests span across South Asian religious, visual and performing arts, drawing from an extensive pool of Sanskrit and Tamil literary cultures, ritual practices and early modern ethno-musicology.

Victoria Andrews

Victoria Andrews is pursuing her PhD in the history of art and architecture with a focus on South Asia. Her dissertation investigates the relationships between the environment, Buddhist wall paintings, and architecture in Western Himalaya. Her research weaves together consideration for both the local and trans-regional elements of Buddhist space with the aim to reposition Western Himalayan regions, namely Ladakh and Zangskar, within their own histories and better understand their contributions to medieval exchange networks that traversed South, East and Central Asia. Her recent work also includes an essay examining contemporary agricultural rituals and their relationship with art-making, architectural space, and earthen spirits in Ladakh. She also contributes to the digital humanities project, Mapping Color in History, through art historical and archival research on paintings from South Asia and the Himalayas.

Vaishnavi Patil

Vaishnavi Patil is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, writing her dissertation on mother-child imagery from the first to the tenth century CE. Her work seeks to understand the evolution of the “mother-child” iconographic type in South Asia and shed light on little-understood aspects of the religious lives of ordinary people through the lens of gender, trans-regionalism, and trans-sectarianism. Her recent scholarship also covers contemporary South Asian Art, including an essay on the Public Art Fund’s exhibition, Ancestor. Vaishnavi has previously worked on projects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harvard Art Museums and contributed to research on South Asian paintings and drawings from the 15th -18th centuries through her work on the Digital Humanities project Mapping Color in History.