Safe Waters, a solo exhibition by Monya Riachi at Lewisham Arthouse, marked the culmination of Riachi’s time on the Lewisham Arthouse Graduate Residency Award.

Monya Riachi is an interdisciplinary artist, whose material-research practice is realized through installation, sculpture, writing, sound and performance. Her work is narrative-driven and centres matter as a site of archive, engaging with themes around loss, ecological transformation, the politics of land and time, and the entanglement of histories of her home and adopted countries Lebanon and Britain, drawing on personal and political histories through a new materialist approach.

Safe Waters is a new body of work developed during Riachi’s yearlong residency award at Lewisham Arthouse. The work starts by considering the very building it is exhibited in, the year of its construction and the story of the founding of Lewisham; before exploring their ties – through material, resource and power – to the continued violence on the land from which the artist comes: the Levant. Drawing connections across geographies and time, Riachi uses maps, salt, water and the poppy as both subjects and materials to create a site-specific installation that holds notions of a history, as well as our present.

Riachi researches the political and geological histories that have connected – or indeed separated – these geographies, from 20 th Century political treaties to the Messinian Salinity Crisis of 5.3 millenia ago. The installation occupies the gallery in the former Deptford Central Library, a Victorian heritage building, to offer a space where connection is favoured over division, learning from the language of water.

Safe Waters has received public funding from Arts Council England and received curatorial support from Jessica El Mal as part of As We Are, Might Have Beenn and Could Be, the Arab British Centre’s three-year visual arts and talent development programme supported by Freelands Foundation.

Exhibition events included a Q&A with the artist, hosted by El Mal, at Lewisham Arthouse.