Afterlives of Water/Bodies

Sa'dia Rehman's art ist port fo lio draws on their 2025 exhi bi tion Water/Bodies at the Loeb Gallery, Poughkeepsie, New York, curated by Azra Dawood. 1 Works from the exhi bi tion form an expan sive archive of mate ri als and tech niques, includ ing draw ings, prints, tex tiles, sculp ture, and video.Rehman con nects two sites across the globe, the Indus and Hudson River val leys, whose sys tems engulf com plex his to ries of unset tle ment, dis place ment, relo ca tion, and contested resettlement, sys tems whose ecopol i tics reflect those of nations and inter na tional rela tions.The twin loca tions also ref er ence Rehman's famil ial migra tory his tory, from dis place ment by the build ing of the Tarbela Dam fol low ing the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between Pakistan and India to their birth place in New York State.Rehman con nects lived expe ri ence and geo po lit i cal maneu ver ing to art his tory, draw ing upon the Hudson Valley's close asso ci a tion with the nineteenthcen tury Hudson River school of art ists and its pro duc tion of an Amer i can pas to ral, which in turn pro vi des a visual vocab u lary for man i fest des tiny.Drawing directly on its images, Rehman includes in their exhi bi tion a repro duc tion by James David Smillie of a paint ing from Thomas Cole's fourpart series The Voyage of Life (1840).A sequence of life's stages, the series depicts a voy ager shepherded by an angel from birth and youth into adult hood and old age, until he ascends to a white, heav enly tem ple at the moment of death.It is a melo dra matic met a phor for the newly established nationturnedempire, with the river itself as the con vey ance of life.In Rehman's global and crit i cal retell ing-and in our time of cli mate dev as ta tionriv ers take on more haunting aspects.Nicholas Bourriaud, discussing Georges Bataille, describes rudology (from the Latin rudus, mean ing "rub ble"), the sci ence of waste, as the exam i na tion of "social