Singaporean artist, educator, and researcher Zarina Muhammad for a presentation on her interdisciplinary practice critically re-examines oral histories, mythologies, and historiographic narratives through performance, ritual, installation, sound, and participatory encounters. .

In this talk, Zarina discusses her processual installation Turn Your Face to the Wind and Follow the Movement of the Sun, which traces elemental, spiritual, and political entanglements of water in Southeast Asia. Anchored in the tidal rhythms of Cyrene Reef. Engaging with cycles of emergence and submergence, the talk offers a deeply poetic reflection on how we might listen to the porous, fugitive, and ancestral voices carried by water.

Tomoko Hayashi is a Japanese artist whose work explores the relationship between inner nature—the subtle currents of human consciousness—and outer nature—the shifting, often imperceptible forces of the physical world. She has an ongoing interest in merging scientific, spiritual, and material worlds—using sound, mud, microorganisms, and light to evoke ephemeral resonances, like a signal briefly caught on a crystal radio. One such signal emerges in her recent video installation inspired by Mizorogaike, a mysterious, ancient pond in northern Kyoto known for its glacial relict species and its cultural reverence as "Mizoro-ike/Bodhisattva Pond." Weaving underwater footage, field recordings, and local memories, Hayashi’s work in Actions for Water captures the pond’s natural rhythms and layered human histories. This reflects her ongoing engagement with unseen life processes and the fragile, living connection between land, memory, and spirit.

Daniel Jan Martin is an environmental planner, designer, and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the University of Western Australia, based in Noongar Country in the state’s southwest. His practice spans geospatial analysis, environmental planning, and landscape strategy, with a focus on integrating ecological systems into urban design. As co-lead of the collaborative practice Super Natural, Daniel explores the intersections of environment, culture, and urbanism through mapping, storytelling, and design.

Daniel will introduce his work including The Whole Perth Catalogue—an evolving digital toolkit that reimagines Perth as a living wetland. Through essays, maps, and cartographic provocations, the Catalogue brings to light the city's hidden hydrological systems and ecological deep structures.

Sao Sreymao (b. 1986, at a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border) is a multidisciplinary Cambodian artist whose practice encompasses painting, photography, digital drawing, sculpture, and performance. A graduate of Phare Ponleu Selpak’s School of Visual and Applied Arts in Battambang (2006), Sreymao’s work is deeply rooted in explorations of memory, identity, and the rapidly transforming landscapes of Cambodia.

In her recent River As Artery series, Sreymao explores the fragile ecologies of Cambodia’s river systems, particularly the deep interconnection between the Mekong River and the Tonlé Sap Lake. These waterways, which have long been central to cultural and ecological life in Cambodia, are now sites of environmental stress, impacted by climate change, hydropower development, and shifting land use. The series draws from her collaborations with local NGOs and her fieldwork with communities living along these vital water bodies.

Virginia Hanusik is a US based artist and writer whose projects explore the relationship between landscape, culture, and the built environment. Her book, Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana (Columbia University Press, 2024), was shortlisted for the 2024 Paris Photo-Aperture First Photobook Award. In South Louisiana, situated where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water — and the history of controlling it — is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry — past, present, and future.

Turpin Crawford Studio is a Sydney-based public art practice founded by Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford in 1994 known for their collaborative, site-specific works that explore the dynamic relationships between people, nature, and the built environment.

Turpin Crawford Studio’s work with water exemplifies their deep engagement with the dynamic energies of nature and their commitment to revealing the interconnectedness of ecological, environmental and human systems. Over the past three decades, they have created kinetic installations that respond to the ever-changing energies of water, transforming public spaces into living systems that reflect cycles of movement, flow, and transformation. These works—situated between art and environment—often emerge from interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists, engineers, and communities, and are embedded in broader ecological and urban rehabilitation efforts.