February 22–August 10, 2025

Seen primarily as a commodity or landscape feature, water—aided by the human, geographic, and institutional bodies that attempt to control it—hides its complexity. Artist and researcher Sa’dia Rehman’s work surfaces the histories of power and displacement concealed within water bodies. Across its many actions and forms (flowing in rivers, flooding terrains, contained within reservoirs, or draining out of spaces), water is central to our lives: it indelibly constructs our physical, personal, and political landscapes. Rehman draws out the stories of these landscapes by paying attention to water’s material nature, and to its varying relationships to land. Springing from the history of the Indus River—which flows through Tibet, Kashmir, and Pakistan—Rehman’s practice also expands to global sites. At the Loeb, the artist will create a large site-responsive wall drawing that engages critically with Vassar’s founding collection of Hudson River School art. Breaking with these nineteenth-century paintings’ idealized pastoral representations, Rehman’s drawing makes visible latent themes of empire, religion, and Manifest Destiny that undergird the Hudson Valley, as well as global histories of dam-induced displacement of water and people. The wall drawing will be in dialogue with other multimedia works also by the artist. In April, the exhibition will expand to a second gallery. Water/Bodies is curated by Azra Dawood, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Academic Programs

Funding credits: This exhibition is made possible by generous support provided by the Mellon Foundation.