Of Land and Water: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection

In the Malay language, spoken across Maritime Southeast Asia, the word for homeland [tanah air] is forged by combining the words for ‘land’ [tanah] and ‘water’ [air]. The linking of static land and fluid waterways creates a notion of belonging that poetically reflects the archipelagic nature of the region.

During Indonesia’s War of Independence (1945–1949), which followed almost 150 years of Dutch colonial rule, tanah air took on a new intonation when it was paradoxically used as an ideological term for solidifying a unified nation, binding over 10,000 islands into a contiguous territory. This political shift was followed by a period of chaos, in which those who did not fit the nation-state dogma became victims of violence or were forcefully repatriated. 

How do borders and ideologies attempt to contain open stretches of land and water, and segregate those who inhabit them? What ties us to a place, and what severs us from it? Which ways of living and knowledge can move freely across borders, unbound by race and political ideas like the winds and tides? 

Of Land and Water: Works from the Sharjah Art Foundation Collection brings together selections that grapple with some of these questions, offering different perspectives on our association with and relationship to land, water and homeland. In works by nine artists and collectives from around the world, the ambitions of the postcolonial nation-state are juxtaposed with the grief of those who have been deprived of their native land or whose fragmented identities go unrecognised by the state. Water flows through many of the works, appearing as a border that defines territories, a gateway to the unknown and an open network that allows mythologies, histories and music to seep through artificial divides. 

Of Land and Water is curated by Jiwon Lee, Head of Curatorial, and Abdulla Aljanahi and Amal Al Ali, Curatorial Assistants, with Souraya Kreidieh and Shahd Murshed, Collection Department, Sharjah Art Foundation.