Part of Alserkal Art Week: A Wild Stitch
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation & Alserkal Arts Foundation
Adelita Husni Bey presented a lecture performance of her research on water infrastructure, drawing from her work Like a Flood (2025), which was part of the Sharjah Biennial 16, supported by Alserkal Arts Foundation.
Her work reflects on the forced settlement of Libyan populations through the extraction and deviation of water supplies during Italian colonisation (1911–1943), linking wells and dams in Libyan popular poetry to resistance and climate debt.
Exploring the photographic archives of the Italian Institute for Africa and the Orient (ISIAO), and looking towards her own family history, Adelita's research examines how water infrastructure—often rendered invisible—has shaped population settlement, imperialist expansion, and colonial ventures, with profound reverberations in the present.
About the Artist
Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue whose practice is grounded in anarcho-collectivism, theatre and legal anthropology. Through workshops and artworks rooted in noncompetitive pedagogical models, she engages a broad spectrum of participants, including activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, poets, actors and urbanists. Her practice emphasises collective experimentation and critical reflection on sociopolitical systems and structures.
The artist’s work has been exhibited at various institutional and non-institutional venues, including the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). As a Vera List Center Fellow (2020–2022), she investigated the social transformations prompted by pandemics through a purpose-built maze structure that served as a dynamic space for workshops and lectures.
For Sharjah Biennial 16, she collaborated with researcher Shehrazade Mahassini on a film installation that explores water extraction, infrastructure and the politics of adaptability, addressing environmental crises shaped by contemporary economic systems and their histories.