Against the Current
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| Admission: Free Admission |
| Which languages: English, German, Spanish |
| Venue: Ground Floor, Hall 2 |
| Belongs to: Opening Mine. Yours. Ours!?, Agua. The Art and Cosmologies of Water, Nhé’ẽ – Circle Conversations |
From the mist of the Páramo de Sumapaz and the rivers of Chile to the polluted waters of Guanabara Bay, Juliana Steiner Fraser, Gabriela Urrutia Da Bove, Stephanie Maiwald, and Anne Bechstedt follow water through contested landscapes. They discuss water rights that have turned rivers into commodities, the impacts of the fossil fuel industry, and the communities responding through activism and collective knowledge.
Nhé’ẽ are circular conversations where knowledge, experiences, and perspectives are shared. The term comes from the Guarani language and can mean the word, the voice, and language, but also the spirit.
Beteiligte
Gabriela Urrutia Da Bove (Valdivia, 1985) is a curator, researcher, cultural manager, and lecturer at the Institute of Visual Arts of the Austral University of Chile. Her work is situated at the intersection of contemporary art, territory, and ecology, with a particular interest in artistic research practices, situated knowledge, and collaborative methodologies. She researches the relationships between human and more-than-human communities, water and territory, as well as processes of collective creation in southern Chile. She is the director of the FRAGUA artist residency and co-director of Galería Barrios Bajos, a platform dedicated to the creation, research, and dissemination of contemporary art and culture.
Juliana Steiner Fraser is an independent curator and researcher based in Bogotá. Her practice engages contemporary art, pedagogy, architecture, and political ecology.
She is Associate Curator of the Bogotá Biennial, opening September 2027. Recent projects include Leonel Vásquez’s first New York solo exhibition at 601 Artspace (2026) and Ecotono: Chagras, Payaos, Camellones, developed for Common Ground at Bard College (2022–23), which culminated in the publication Ecotone: Silent Revolutions (Bard College Press, 2025), a finalist in the XIV Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism (2026).