Water(Proof)
A fascinating, thoughtful collection of short films for Food Art Week 2019: WATER.
Shaarbek Amankul’s (Kyrgystan) video New Society, documents the devastating ironies of economic privation in his native Kyrgystan, where poor villagers drain the contents of water bottles into the arid earth, preferring the quick cash from recycling to the water itself. Environmental artist Janet Laurence (Australia) addresses the fragility of our oceans in her video Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef, created for the UN Climate Conference, COP21, in Paris.
This work envisions a hospital for the Reef’s threatened corals and other marine species in this time of ecological crisis, making visible the otherwise invisible devastation beneath the surface of the sea. Stefano Cagol’s (Italy) video performance amidst the ice of the Arctic Circle, Evoke, Provoke [the border], raises issues of mankind’s unrelenting impact upon even the harshest of environments.
Almagul Menlibayeva’s (Kazakhstan) film, Transoxiana Dreams, documents the desertification of the Aral Sea, poetically following the plight of fishermen who now have to drive for hours from their village to reach the rapidly shrinking sea. Nezaket Ekici (Turkey) and Shahar Marcus’s (Israel) video performance Salt Dinner is set within another shrinking sea, Israel’s Dead Sea. What looks like an absurd aquatic picnic is in truth a brutal endurance test for both artists; the excess of salt they are consuming with the seawater being as lethally dehydrating as the midday sun.
Nina E. Schönefeld’s (Germany) video Dark Waters takes place in another poison sea. Set in a dystopian future where the oceans are poisoned with plastic and only jellyfish can survive in their waters, this film sadly bears more resemblance to truth than science fiction. Shingo Yoshida’s (Japan) video Réprouvé is striking for its very absence of water; turning a garbage-strewn wasteland in Chile into a beautiful sound installation, it is nevertheless a frightening glimpse of what our planet may soon look like if we do not take better care of it, and if we do not curb overproduction of waste.
Nezaket Ekici’s Water To Water, the documentation of her performance at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee museum, poses a beautifully impractical solution to a future of impending water shortages. Over the course of several laborious hours she manually filters five pitchers of lake water, drunk with varying degrees of reluctance by her audience.
These video works in our program for Food Art Week may be only tangentially about food, and yet each work illustrates in its own way the vast diversity in which water impacts upon the cycle of life on our planet. From the desertification of climate change to the predicted floods of melting glaciers, water is as deadly in its scarcity as it is in excess. And yet, life cannot exist without it. WATER(PROOF) is about such paradoxes. In our utter dependence on water, we nevertheless contrive to poison and squander it.
Nothing is waterproof, in the sense of being impervious to water, when water is perceived as integral to almost every industry which sustains our lifestyles and quality of life. Yet our lifestyles are poisoning our planet. WATER(PROOF) assembles the positions and experiences of eight international artists, each proving, in their own way, the precarious paradoxes of the cycles of water consumption and production, integrally linked to what we eat and how we eat it.
Accompanying the WATER(PROOF) video program are three short videos by Tainá Guedes, Founding Director of Food Art Week. Starting with a brief overview of FAW, we move on to an educational video illustrating the crucial issues impacting upon our pollution and consumption of water, made with Tainá’s students at the Berlin High School, Friedensburg OS. And with her students at the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Pollenzo, Italy) at the Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology, and Education, program, Tainá has documented a performative workshop addressing scarcity and inequality in access to food and water.
Through its education initiatives, Food Art Week uses the visual arts as a powerful medium to convey important messages at the time of climate change. Food Art Week, combining food, art and sustainability for positive social and environmental change.
WATER(PROOF) is a cooperation between MOMENTUM and Food Art Week on the occasion of Berlin Food Art Week 2019: WATER.
Featuring: Shaarbek Amankul, Stefano Cagol, Nezaket Ekici, Janet Laurence, Shahar Marcus, Almagul Menlibayeva, Nina E. Schönefeld, Shingo Yoshida.
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch, Founding Director of MOMENTUM, the Global Platform for Time-Based Art
Food Art Week, created by artist/chef Tainá Guedes in 2015, is a non-profit project, whose mission is to promote positive change in our environment and society by asking how ‘what we eat and how we eat it’ is irrevocably affecting our environment. With a new thematic focus each year, the topic of Food Art Week 2019 is WATER. Life on our planet started in the water. Like our planet, we ourselves are 70% water. Yet many living beings have no access to clean water. Plastic pollution, nanoparticles, pesticides and antibiotics are damaging our freshwater and oceans. Only 2% of the total water on our planet is clean.
MOMENTUM is Berlin’s platform for Time-Based Art: Video, Performance, New Media, Sound, and in our cooperation with Food Art Week, also Food. To address the crucial issues raised by Food Art Week 2019: WATER, we present a video program by renowned international artists engaged in a broader dialogue on the deterioration of our environment.