Writ On Water

Micheline Klagsbrun

Curated by Aneta Georgievska-Shine

April 23rd - May 17th, 2025

WRIT ON WATER explores the instability of memory and identity. In recent years, my focus on immigration and displacement has deepened my awareness of the significance of ”papers”— documents of passage (visas, letters), family photographs, spiritual texts — fragile yet integral to our sense of self.

I think of my late grandmother’s photo album, my family’s only surviving archive, and the scraps of memory it preserves. I think of what other refugees have carried with them: the remains of a Bible abandoned in the border desert, love letters folded in a pocket, a crumpled photograph tucked into a wallet. I imagine these precious documents as they change over time — floating, dissolving, disappearing underwater. Yet water, too, holds memory. As words and images dissolve, they drift into the unseen world, preserved in other forms.

My mixed-media works are layered with these scraps, reflecting the elusive nature of identity and remembrance. Many of them begin with the human body as a foundation, inscribed with its own history. Some of these drawings have lifted off the page—expanding, crumpling, and transforming into three-dimensional objects that float in space, like fragments of a book that will never be put together.