We don’t tend to think about flood when we talk about thirst.
What does it mean to be thirsty? What measures will we take to quench our thirst? And how do we control other people’s access to water?
These questions are at the heart of Thirst: In Search of Freshwater at Wellcome Collection, London, an exhibition that draws together historical artefacts, documents and contemporary art to interrogate our relationship with water throughout history.
This article first appeared in the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.
The exhibition’s curator Janice Li explains that she was interested in moving away from studying water as an abstract subject and, instead, looking at our changing relationship with it.
Wells
The direction of the exhibition was inspired in part by the discovery that “in a lot of modern languages, the word ‘thirst’ is derived from the root word ters, meaning ‘dry’,” she says.
“This is also the root for words like ‘terrain’ and ‘territory’ – I found that really interesting. These parallel words emerged around the time civilisations were first being built and territories were first being drawn.
"One can imagine the sensation of thirst being a core motivation of why people draw territory: securing access to fresh water is vital to survival.”
The exhibition opens with a clay tablet inscribed with part of the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’, an ancient Mesopotamian poem composed sometime between 2100 and 1200 BCE.
The tablet, which is accompanied by a replica that visitors can touch, tells the story of a king who tries to force Gilgamesh to enslave his own people to dig wells for water.
Flood
Li explains that while “some people might know the more famous story of the great flood from Gilgamesh, this is a lesser-known story about the first recorded warfare over access to water”.
The object draws together narratives around the water crisis, human greed and conflict, and the environmental crisis: “This story can help us to understand that greed, over-extraction and over-consumption have led to human conflicts and war, which is one of the most environmentally destructive things on the planet.”
Starting in the desert, the exhibition weaves its way fluidly through five thematic sections.
For example, the aridity theme transitions into an exploration of the notion of rain via Adam Rouhana’s large-scale photographic print ‘Ein Aouja’, which captures the joy of Palestinians celebrating the arrival of the first rain in their water channel.
The other side of this story, however, is when we get too much rain: “We don’t tend to think about flood when we talk about thirst,” says Li. “But the reality is that when it floods, drinking water becomes contaminated, so flooding is a form of thirst.”
We don’t tend to think about flood when we talk about thirst.
Temperatures
A key, and increasing, source of flooding is melting glacier ice, which forms the subject of the next section.
Here, a new commission by Nepali artist Karan Shrestha explores the displacement of Indigenous Ladakh communities after glacier meltwater flooding.
In this case, government corruption and inadequate infrastructure failed to support people trying to move to Nepalese cities, forcing many to become migrant workers in the Gulf and other parts of South Asia.
“This is a work that brings us all the way from the ice caps to issues of migrancy, exploitation and displacement, as well as considering the cultural loss of Indigenous legacies, folk songs and traditions,” Li explains.
Moreover, the commission draws on Wellcome-funded public health initiatives to explore the increasing outbreaks of dengue fever in Nepal arising from increasing temperatures, melting ice, and poor living conditions.
Healing
Here, this question of sanitation brings us to a thematic section on surface water, including water treatment and rivers.
This section presents ongoing work on the ‘Eden in Iraq’ wastewater treatment garden, a project led by Nature Iraq that offers a positive example of how Indigenous knowledge and contemporary science can be effectively combined.
The garden sits in marshlands that have been inhabited by the Madan people for thousands of years; the oldest object in the exhibition is a 5,000-year-old seal showing a house built with the same structure that people still live in today.
The garden itself uses the same ancient technologies of reed and mud-brick composites to offer a sewage-treatment filtration solution that is much needed in this delicate ecosystem.
The final section moves underground to consider the importance of groundwater, centring on two hyperlocal narratives.
One project, by Gaylene Gould, tells the story of Mary Woolaston, a woman who managed a healing well nearby on King’s Cross Road in the 17th century.
Survived
Another display showcases cross-disciplinary research into the tube well, one of which sits beneath the Wellcome Collection building.
The exhibition explicates how the technology behind these wells was used to facilitate British colonial expansion in the 19th century.
Throughout the exhibition, historical objects are juxtaposed with contemporary artworks, creating channels for visitors to feel a connection with their ancestors.
Thirst encourages us to consider the people who lived on dry land thousands of years ago, how they survived, and how we can learn from their wisdom.
Economies
The exhibition is careful to avoid romanticising Indigenous knowledge as something mystical, and instead seeks to frame this knowledge as engineering, citing some of the ambitious and ingenious ways in which people have accessed fresh water in challenging environments over the millennia.
Flowing across a range of times and geographies, the exhibition asks us to consider the myriad human and environmental factors that impact our relationship with and access to fresh water.
“There’s huge political and socioeconomic inequality at the heart of many of these stories,” says Li.
She emphasises that watery ecologies, cultures and economies are closely linked – and are often affected by inequality and oppression in inextricable ways.
This Author
Anna Souter is a writer, editor and curator with an interest in contemporary art and ecology. Thirst: In Search of Freshwater is at Wellcome Collection, London, until 1 February 2026. This article first appeared in the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.
