Thirst: In Search of Freshwater recentres water within daily life: across the 125 objects in the exhibition, it looks at communities spanning the globe and their interactions with this vital resource. From the qanats, which originate from the plains of Khuzestan in Iran 3000 years ago and resurface in rural Sicily, to wadis in Palestine, to the wetland ‘kidneys of the planet’, to the Black Mary Project down the road from The Wellcome in London’s Kings Cross, activists, curators and artists throughout the exhibition clearly feel that it is their moral prerogative to educate people. Water management is as much a social and ethical duty as it is a feat of engineering or governance. Water is a source of reverie and crucially, a form of hope. ...
It wouldn’t be an exhibition at the Wellcome without a high-tech installation piece. Raqs Media Collective’s interactive augmented reality installation Epilogue (2025) envisions a future beyond the present era, in which our fate already appears sealed. In true Muskian fashion, it looks beyond Earth to ‘a speculative future in which human survival depends on the search for and the mining of water from asteroids.’
