What is held in the ground is never singular. The soil holds what has been built and what has been undone. It carries gestures of care sedimented within violent histories. To approach the ground, here, is to approach a field of entanglement—a temporal convergence of soil, labour, and memory. Shaped by particular landscapes and micro-topographies, ingredients, gestures, and tastes become a living archive carried within and through practice. 

flour, water, soil, initiated by maria khatchadourian, takes shape through new and adapted site-specific works by Areej Ashhab, the duo Common Ground (Anna Celda and Saja Amro), Ola Hassanain, maria khatchadourian, Ai Ozaki and belit sağ. Together, the works in the exhibition attend to soil, seed, water, fermentation, and ruin as sites where care and violence are entangled—holding stories of repair, dispossession, and continuity.

The exhibition reflects on food, land, and agricultural practice as the infrastructures through which geographies of displacement, colonial rupture, and kinship are carried and contested—fragile geographies that resist erasure through dialect, embodied knowledge, and ancestral recipes.

To gather is to remain with others, to share what is available, to sustain forms of relation under pressure. With an extended community programme, the exhibition unfolds through acts of gathering: conversations, reading sessions, workshops, shared meals, foraging, and collective actions. Emerging as an exhibition continually in flux, flour, water, soil will expand through gestures that activate the space as a lived, living, and sustaining environment.

Visual identity by Farah Fayyad.

This exhibition is generously supported by Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and Mondriaan Fund.

Press release (pdf)
Press kit (zip)