Water as a Common Ground: Notes from a Majlis at Jameel Arts Centre
7 November 2026, 12:00–18:00
Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai · Free entrance
Convened by Art Jameel and the Visible project, Water as a Common Ground: Notes from a Majlis brings artists, scientists, legal thinkers and researchers together to explore climate-affected water systems, their vulnerable ecologies and the possibilities that socially engaged art can open in response.
The public symposium grows out of a closed working session on 6 November. On 7 November, these exchanges open to the audience.
The day format draws on the Majlis al-Shura, a consultative assembly rooted in Arab traditions of mutual deliberation, and on Visible’s experience of temporary parliaments as spaces for collective learning. Each artist or collective brings a concrete question from their practice. Respondents take it up from their respective fields, and together they develop connections and questions to carry into the public consultations.
Following waterways and the communities organised around them, from the Tigris and the Al Ahsa oasis to the forests of the Western Ghats, the conversations consider ancestral and economic relationships to water, disappearing geographies, hydrojustice and the colonial legacies of ecological control. They invite the audience into a process of thinking together, with its differences and unresolved questions still in view.
Programme
12:00 – 12:30 pm
Welcome
Introduction by Art Jameel and Visible.
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez introduces the format of the Public Consultation and the process developed during the previous day’s closed laboratory.
12:30–2 pm
Consultation 1: Living waterways, memory and ecological crisis
Ida Bencke from Hosting Lands and Sherko Abbas (as artists) with Reem Rizk, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Aaron Bartholomew (as respondents).
3 –4:30 pm
Consultation 2: Cultivation, commons and situated knowledge
Mayur Vayeda from Waral Prakalp and Sara Alomran from Maghras (as artists) with Khalil Walji, Naeema Ali and Rohan D’Souza (as respondents).
4:45 – 5:30 pm
Closing Consultation
Led by Nataša Pertešin-Bachelez. A collective reflection on the day’s discussions, emerging questions and shared knowledge.
