Manjot Kaur: The Pool of Memories

What’s your relationship with water? How does water remind you of home? What memories and stories do you associate with water?

Visual artist Manjot Kaur invites you to step inside an audiovisual immersive water tank called The Pool of Memories inspired by exhibiting artist Rajesh Vora’s Everyday Monuments. Vora’s photographs feature domestic sculptures mounted on rooftops in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab. These sculptures serve as functional water tanks in the villages of Punjab and tell stories of identity, longing, migration, diaspora, family, and cultural roots. 

Kaur asks visitors to reflect on their own relationships with water and how water reminds them of home. Just like bodies of water exist in various breadths and depths, shapes, and locations (creeks, brooks, streams, rivers, lakes, oceans), so do our water-based stories and memories. Write or draw stories, anecdotes, poems, or images that come to mind with the paper and pen provided in the room. Then submerge the paper into a water tank that collectively stores these individual responses.

The Pool of Memories confronts the viewer to reflect upon the human care that goes into preserving water in our current climate. From scarcity of water, rapidly disrupting weather patterns, contaminated water supplies, food security, and more, we are forced to re-evaluate our access to water.

This immersive sound installation allows us to recount our personal and collective memories in shaping meaning, values, home, and identities through storytelling.

About the Artist

Manjot Kaur’s drawings, paintings, and time-based media summon the mystical, scientific, and absurd to draw attention to current sociopolitical predicaments and the sovereignty of ecology. Borrowed imagery and text bridge the past and present, which traverse speculative fiction, visual storytelling, and myth-making, to explore the interconnection between humans and more than humans. Attempting to decolonize both women’s bodies and nature, she refers to archaic cultural symbols of fertility to reflect on present-day reproductive rights of various species of flora and fauna. Through her work, there emerges a conceptual framework of natural culture, which proposes different ways of thinking about agency and power, difference and sociality, ontology and epistemology.