Currents of Care Exhibition

December 11th-20th, 2025

Co-Presented by OceanWise, Leadership for the Ecozoic, Critical Media Lab, and the McGill Office of Sustainability

Statement

Water holds stories. More than a substance, water is a medium of memory and relation—a force through which lives are carried, entangled, and remade. Currents of Care is a multimedia exhibition that asks how we might imagine water otherwise: not as a resource to be managed, but as a teacher, kin, and co-creator of worlds.

Presented at McGill’s Critical Media Lab, Currents of Care reflects on waterways as sites of rupture and regeneration. Through video, installation, sound, and text, the exhibition invites audiences into imaginative engagements with water that foreground the fullness and abundance of water life-worlds amid narratives of scarcity and inanimacy. 

This project explores relation through water—seeping through membranes, water saturates physical, metaphorical, and ontological bounds of life and object. Every border becomes a mixing threshold of connection between beings: shorelines, estuaries, cells, and phases of matter are dynamic in their meeting. In these spaces of encounter, friction, and transformation, we are reminded of our planetary entanglement, our shared finitude, and collective livenesses. With water as a witness and guide towards alternative modes of living and making in common, Currents of Care reclaims imagination as a method of ecological action.

This is a living exhibition. A space for gathering, reading, drifting, and listening. Rather than a grasp for certainty, Currents of Care is a call to feel our way through the watery worlds we already inhabit. It is an invitation to sit with the abundance, precarity, and imaginative depth of water-life—and to ask what it might mean to live and imagine otherwise, with and through water.

Featuring the work of

Nina Vroemen (Sculpture)

Lina Choi (Sound)

Erin Robinsong (Poetry)

Uapukun Mestokosho (Film)

Camille Huang (Dance)

Artwork Descriptions

Under the Waves II – Lina Choi (15′ soundscape, 2023)

Under the Waves II is a 15-minute immersive soundscape composed from field recordings captured at the Lachine Canal and rivers across Quebec, combined with fragments of watery sounds gathered during the participatory workshop Soundwalk along the Water, which took place in 2023 as part of the DARE-DARE programme. Using binaural microphones, the work creates a soft, three-dimensional listening space that surrounds the listener, evoking the feeling of being held in a calming, dreamy, and meditative watery world that invites a sense of familiarity and instinctive comfort.

Nipi utaiamun – Uapukun Mestokosho (5′ short film)

Nipi utaiamun (Voice of Water) is a tribute to the healing and spiritual virtues of water. In the film, Uapukun Mestokosho listens to water as both teacher and relative, evoking its power to soothe, to remember, and to carry the voices of generations.

Echoes in the shallow deep – Erin Robinsong (poems, river water, plastic, repuposed canvas, rocks, 2025)

“Oceanic Parts” was written in the wake of two deaths, trying to join our worlds back together, or feel the continuity of life and death realms. // “Rain on the Inarticulate” – a play on TS Eliot’s raid on the inarticulate – is influenced by Astrida Neimanis’s concept of hydrofeminism and considers my body as a meeting point for waterborne memories and toxins that far exceed me in space and time, and the implications of this in a world that fantasizes bodies as discrete. // “Kitchen Danceparty” is a transcript or record of a dance that erupted one night with three friends. Most dances are lost to history, or given away to the air, maybe they power the world, but I’ve always been fascinated by what happens to space and thought when dancing // The poem installation was designed by the curators, and invites audiences to sit with and touch the water and poems within.

Some things last a long time – Nina Vroemen (stoneware, steel, IV drip, stone, 2024)

A time keeper: erosion.

Breathing Ghosts Again – Nina Vroemen (stoneware, humidifier, activated with atomizer, 2024)

The inheritance of a breath.