Inês Zenha – Murky Waters

Inês Zenha creates a fluid and immersive landscape where identity, desire and corporeality interweave in a process of transformation. About In Murky Waters, Inês Zenha (Lisbon, 1995) creates a fluid and immersive landscape where identity, desire and corporeality interweave in a continual process of transformation. Based on a vocabulary that is simultaneously poetic and political, the artist proposes an underground journey through systems—of the body and of human infrastructures—in which water, bodily fluids and clay become the common threads of that transformation. This notion of 'becoming liquid' is the conceptual and formal axis of the exhibition. In their refusal to be fixed, classified or contained, the liquids mirror the dynamics of the queer experience, marked by ideas of negotiation, transition and resilience. Water thus ceases to be merely a metaphor and instead takes a leading role, passing through and linking the different works. The exhibition space transforms into a kind of post-human cave—simultaneously a temple and a drain—where pipes and hydraulic systems cross paths with performative gestures, converting the exhibition into a living organism that breathes, overflows and digests. In this porous atmosphere, the audience is no longer a passive observer but participates in a choreography of flows, invited to feel for themselves the rhythmic movement of water. Murky Waters rejects the hygienic logic of purity and order. Instead, it welcomes the monstrous, the animal, the stranger, the shady and the queer—figures that have historically been erased in the dominant normative imagination. Zenha's work insists on their presence, building a space where contamination becomes care, vulnerability becomes strength and marginality becomes a place of radical affirmation. Rather than offering answers, the exhibition creates the conditions to feel, experience and unlearn. Murky Waters celebrates porosity, hybridity and survival, reminding us that, like water, we endure not in spite of our fluidity, but precisely because of it. Read more Toggle Painting Sculpture Mixed media Installation