Untitled (from the series Still Water (The River Thames, for Example)) 1999

Curator: Looking at this, I immediately sense a stillness despite the movement in the water. Editor: Yes, and this piece, Roni Horn's "Untitled (from the series Still Water (The River Thames, for Example))" created in 1999, certainly plays with those contrasting ideas. It's a photograph, part of a larger series exploring the Thames. Curator: The Thames…that river carries so much historical weight, doesn’t it? As a site of trade, colonialism, ecological damage... It's laden with narratives of power and dispossession. I wonder what Horn is saying about our relationship to these waterways? Editor: Horn often uses water as a symbolic medium, a mirror reflecting not just light, but also memory and time. Consider water's traditional associations with cleansing and the unconscious mind. Notice how the reflections disrupt a clear view of what lies beneath. Curator: Precisely. That opaqueness suggests a resistance to easy readings. There’s something about the formal composition, too—the water almost entirely fills the frame, leaving no room for horizon, no context. Is this emphasizing our limited perspective, the human inability to grasp the entirety of something so vast and complex? Editor: It creates an intimacy, but also a kind of disorientation, doesn’t it? One can find connections to other representations of bodies of water like for example, Hokusai's "Great Wave", but whereas that represents water's powerful force, here it feels almost contemplative. Curator: Yet water itself, particularly rivers like the Thames, have been exploited and abused for centuries. So this abstracted view could also speak to that historical blindness, a privileging of aesthetic beauty over tangible environmental concerns. This, in turn, forces questions on who gets to decide the meaning behind representations. Editor: So, ultimately it seems, this “still water” asks anything but for the viewer to remain still or take in beauty superficially. Curator: Yes, perhaps to stir us. It invites an engagement with the weight of both the subject, and our relation to it.