The Water Understands is a contemporary art exhibition interrogating water as a life-giving element, whose importance to humanity has been examined from multiple angles for thousands of years. Artists make work about it, scientists experiment with it, and poets write about it.

The Water Understands takes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Water as a starting point. In the poem, Emerson imbues the element of water with subjective human experiences – understanding, heartbreak, wit, the ability to destroy, and alternatively the ability to enjoy pleasure. It is the understanding, or the water’s metaphorical ability to imbue us with knowledge, which is at the core of this exhibition – knowledge of the past, cultural knowledge, traditional knowledge, poetic knowledge, political knowledge, and aesthetic knowledge – knowledge systems which inform the artists and artworks in this exhibition.

The artists selected for The Water Understands work within a broad range of cultural narratives, and using different media, allowing for an exhibition that thoroughly interrogates the metaphorical qualities of water from multiple perspectives.