ART SCIENCE dialogue feat. Huniti Goldox and Younes Saramifar
The final ART SCIENCE dialogue of our current exhibition Water Views will feature artist duo Huniti Goldox, Younes Saramifar, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Art and Culture, History, Antiquity, and Heidi Mendoza, PhD Candidate from the Water and Climate Risk group at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). The conversation will delve into how water, our relationship to it and the politics around it, can be a source of knowledge.
The dialogue will delve into what water can teach us about power dynamics, marginalized histories and ecology? The work of Huniti Goldox forms the basis of a conversation on what pre-industrial and indigenous knowledge on time and water can teach us now. The immersive installation Measuring Time through the Fall of Water prioritizes the interconnectedness of natural matter in contrast to the concept of exploitation that has prevailed in dominant power systems.
The dialogue will be moderated by Manuela Zammit
About the speakers
HUNITI GOLDOX is the artist duo of Areej Huniti and Eliza Goldox. Their work investigates how political systems, infrastructures and histories of violence are inscribed in water, land and collective memory. They work with marginalised oral histories and mythologies as counter-languages that confront dominant narratives. Their practice creates immersive, participatory digital environments that propose audiences as not mere spectators, but active agents in negotiating histories, ecologies and futures. Through films, digital re-enactment, 360 degree environments, installations, workshops and interventions, they interrogate how space, material and narrative produce relations of power and forms of resistance. From a buried river in Amman to artificial lake-lands in Leipzig, post-earthquake architectures in Albania and Mediterranean coastlines, their projects trace the entanglement of human and non-human histories, revealing the tensions, fractures and possibilities that shape our shared environments. Their work has been presented internationally, including at the Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid (2023); Hauser & Wirth, Menorca (2023); TBA Academy/Ocean Uni, Madrid (2022); Tirana Art Lab (2022); D21, Leipzig (2021); Sheffield Film Festival (2021); Biennale Mediterranea, San Marino (2021); SomoS Art House, Berlin (2020); SPARC*, Venice (2020); Darat al Funun, Amman (2019); MMAG Foundation, Amman (2019); and The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts.
Younes Saramifar is an assistant professor of cultural anthropology with two doctorates in Sociology and Cultural Anthropology. His work focuses on interdisciplinary research of narratives of domination and political storytelling of religious populism. His work touches on ethnography, humanities and social sciences to rediscover the familiar in unfamiliar ways. He approaches research through objects and bodies configured through history and collective memory. His approach centres on Material Religion, Visual Studies, Intersectional Feminism, Critical Race Theory, and Speculative Realism.
Heidi Mendoza is a PhD Candidate from the Water and Climate Risk group at the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM). Her PhD research focuses on understanding how riverine communities live and imagine with droughts and floods in the Peruvian Amazon. Her work is part of the PerfectSTORM Project (‘STOrylines of futuRe extreMes’) that tries to bring together different disciplines in understanding water-related extremes. Before joining VU Amsterdam, she was the Program Coordinator of the Sustainable and Inclusive Landscape Governance (SILG) implemented by Forest Foundation Philippines, Tropenbos International, and Wageningen University and Research.
Manuela Zammit is a contemporary art historian and critic based in the Netherlands. She currently coordinates the Research & Development department at Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam) and lectures in contemporary art and culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her writing regularly appears on Metropolis M magazine, academic journals and other more experimental platforms. In 2023, she completed a Research Master in Critical Studies in Art and Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.