“Divert the canals to flood the museums!”

“Divert the canals to flood the museums!”
Lecture by Post Brothers

6 December 2025 (Saturday), 5:00 pm
Arsenal Gallery in Białystok
Adama Mickiewicza 2, Białystok
free admission

In the last years, art institutions seem to be flooded with exhibitions and artworks concerning the flows of water, often confronting our climate catastrophe by drawing upon aqueous ecologies. What is it about water that is so enticing for artists, and what about the conditions of our world has inspired them to embrace a fluctuating wetness in their approach? This lecture will survey a broad range of artistic practices throughout history that have engaged water as a subject, a site, and a collaborator, and will dive in and map a certain “underwater” politic, a sea change from underground strategies of resistance and perseverance to more liquid and aqueous approaches. Beyond a discussion of our embeddedness in complex water systems, this talk will also call upon the economic concepts of asset “liquidity” and the indebted state of being “underwater”, as well as the physical and virtual streams of goods and information through, under, and across the seas. Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of “liquid modernity” may also be useful, as well as recent work on the fluidity of identity, Hydrofeminism, and notions of the Black Atlantic, while current tides within geography and ecology can also allow for a more nuanced consideration of territory, sovereignty, and association. Posing wetness as a counter-position to the presumed ‘dryness’ of art, the talk will chart a history of flooded galleries and museums, wet artworks, submerged practices, and other attempts at visualizing and sinking into the deep, and will tie these concepts within the braided river ecologies of Podlasie to explore the possibilities for collective survival in an increasingly wet world.

Post Brothers