ROME.- Something in the Water is the title of the exhibition by the MAXXI Art Department, curated by Oscar Tuazon (Seattle, 1975) with Elena Motisi as associate curator. The exhibition explores water as a metaphor and as an element that resists all attempts to be shaped: an essential medium for artists, a pure mirror. Featuring a new, previously unseen work produced in Rome, the exhibition at MAXXI marks a new chapter in Tuazon’s broader Water School project: a public art initiative that also explores the dynamics and politics linked to access and control over land, water and infrastructure, a holistic practice aimed at creating spaces for gathering and collaboration. Tuazon’s artistic practice, situated in the dialogue between public and private space, moves along fluid boundaries between architecture and activism, privileging relationality over formal purity. His works, born from the interplay between industrial and natural materials - wood, concrete, glass, steel - unfold in installations that engage and question the human body, making it a central presence in the environment.
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The exhibition path of Something in the Water develops within the gallery space as a fluid experience, in which water becomes a connecting thread between artists of different generations and origins. The works on display invite the visitor to perceive the subtle connections that bind them together, in a layout that, flowing from the Gianferrari Room along Gallery 2 of the Museum, evokes the sinuous course of the Tiber’s meanders.
Lita Albuquerque welcomes visitors with a three-channel video installation titled Liquid Light (2022), a journey through time in an attempt to understand the relationship between humans and nature. Facing it is Great Lakes Water School (2023) by Oscar Tuazon in collaboration with Peter Sandbichler - an experimental structure made entirely from salvaged materials. The journey continues in Gallery 2 with Water Cats 8 (2015) by Matthew Barney, a copper sculpture for which the artist entrusts the creative act to the transformative power of water. Here, metal meets water pressure, which sculpts the material into organic forms, turning the casting process itself into one of the essential elements of the work.
Nearby, the vibrant colours of Under the Willow Tree (2022) by Saif Azzuz evoke the waters of Collect Pond, portraying them in their primordial purity, before settlers and industrialisation disrupted its life to make way for the construction of Manhattan. At the heart of Gallery 2, Building (2023) by Tuazon transcends the idea of a simple structure and becomes a relational space, where the public and the artist’s works coexist alongside the video story of the Cedar Spring Water School.
Upon exiting Tuazon’s house, the work by Anna Sew Hoy entitled Psychic Grotto Birdbath (Blue) (2018), conceived as an architecture for birds, emerges as an anthropomorphic fountain, engaging in dialogue with the material darkness of Torkwase Dyson. Her work Bird and Lava #03 (2021) questions the future of freedom and its precarity. A central point of the exhibition path, Untitled (Cascade) (2020) by Virginia Overton transforms the space by turning disused aluminium signs into a sculpture over which water flows, presented here as a living element.
On the walls, siebtermaizweitausendundvierundzwanzig (2024), two vast, mirrored canvases by Ugo Rondinone inspired by the landscapes of Lucerne, are reduced to chromatic and gestural essentials to deliver an art that is accessible to all. Also featured is Kuku Town Core Unit (2023) by Marjetica Potrč, a new edition of a service unit designed for Cape Town. Teetering between urban planning and anthropological project, it symbolises activism aimed at legalising informal settlements.
With the four cartographic panels of the Over the River project (1994–2007), visitors discover the magic of the never-realised work for the Arkansas River, which Christo and Jeanne-Claude pursued for years.
Tuazon also presents Floating Flower and Still Flowing Water (2024), as well as Ocean Pavilion (2025), a new site-specific work for MAXXI featuring a glass fountain: a physical device and consciousness-activating tool, in which water becomes a filter through which to view the world. Abraham Cruzvillegas presents the concept of “autoconstrucción” with Icharhuta atonal en cientotreyntaidosavos de tono (para Luis Gonzalez y Gonzalez) (2017), a traditional canoe from the communities of Lake Pátzcuaro, evoking the memory of the waters and the people who dwell along its course.
Further along the route is another work by Saif Azzuz who, by assembling wood salvaged from rivers, gives life to Scraping by (2022), restoring dignity to the material. Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta (2022) by Pavlo Makov has taken on different forms over the years since its original conception in the 1990s, appearing - at the 59th International Art Exhibition in 2022, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine - as a work reflecting a humanity enslaved by the expropriation of resources.
With Untitled (2022), Leslie Hewitt continues a process of abstraction, translating the effects of the tides and the transformations of the ocean floor into a series of bronze sculptural works. Niagara (1975) and Hydra’s Head (1974) by Nancy Holt close the exhibition’s narrative with moving images of the mighty waters of Niagara which, in their original purity, become a celebration of water’s force and magnificence.
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