WATER
RESISTANCE

The exhibition draws on thinkers such as Maria Mies, Silvia Federici, Vandana Shiva, Rita Segato, Verónica Gago and Astrida Neimanis, whose work traces the historical entanglement of the domination of women and nature within patriarchal, capitalist and colonial systems.

Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva show how the rise of capitalism intensified the exploitation of both women and nature, while Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, locates the violent subjugation of women, their bodies and reproductive capacities at the foundations of capitalist accumulation.

Within this history, water is not understood as a passive resource. Its agency does not imply consciousness or intention, but its material capacity to shape environments, social relations and political realities: rivers overflow, droughts displace communities, water crosses borders, sustains bodies and transforms landscapes.

Water therefore becomes both material and political — a site of creation, memory, care, extraction, resistance and transformation.

The murder of Indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres, who defended the Gualcarque River against a hydroelectric dam project, brings these entangled forms of violence into stark focus. Her struggle and assassination reveal how bodies, territories and natural resources can become subjected to the same extractive logics of power.

Building on Rita Segato’s concept of a pedagogy of cruelty, the exhibition considers violence not only as destruction, but also as a means of disciplining bodies, territories and communities.

In Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis describes human bodies as materially and socially interconnected through water. From this perspective, the boundaries between bodies and environments become unstable: the water within us is part of the same planetary circulation as rivers, rain, oceans and groundwater.

WATER RESISTANCE brings these feminist, ecological and decolonial perspectives together to ask what becomes possible when water is approached not as property, but as a living force, a commons, a witness and a collaborator.

Situated in Vienna — a city profoundly shaped by its relationship with water — the exhibition grounds these questions in a specific local history. The Danube, the Wien River, canals, fountains, pipelines and the city’s water infrastructure reveal histories in which care, politics, technology and access to resources intersect.

Through installation, video, performance, painting, sculpture, photography and sound, Austrian and international artists explore disappearing waterways, pollution, extractivism, climate change and biodiversity loss, while opening new relationships between human and more-than-human worlds.

WATER RESISTANCE calls for forms of coexistence grounded in care, solidarity and collective survival. It asks us to listen to water, to recognize the histories and conflicts it carries, and to imagine justice for bodies and ecosystems as inseparable.