Curator Jane Withers gives a tour of Water Pressure at MK&G

 

Exhibition entrance, MAK Vienna

Exhibition view, Water Stories, MAK Vienna

Rights of a River and Time on the Lachlan River, Marjetica Potrč, 2025, in Water Stories, MAK Vienna

Exhibition view, Timeline, MAK Vienna

Exhibition view, Bodily Waters, MAK Vienna

Exhibition view, Invisible Water, MAK Vienna

Makoko Floating School, NLÉ Architects, Thirsty Cities, MAK Vienna

Exhibition view, Thirsty Cities, MAK Vienna

 

Float by Luisa Charles. Ecosystems, MAK Vienna

Exhibition view, Ecosystems, MAK Vienna

Commission: Re-Imagine Water Flows: From Building to River Basin by OOZE Architects investigates the water challenges for the MK&G Building.

 

Water Pressure: Designing for the Future
Hamburg, Zürich, Vienna
2024 - 2025

Water Pressure: Designing for the Future is a major museum exhibition that presents over a decade of Jane Withers Studio’s pioneering research into the future of water.

Water – whether too much or too little, clean or unsafe – is one of the most pressing human preoccupations. Today, we face a global water crisis due mainly to mismanagement and overuse. If we are to share a liveable future for all, including plants and animals, we must urgently rethink how we value and manage this contested resource.

Water Pressure brings together ideas and solutions from across design, science, and activism that offer new perspectives on the challenges of water. These approaches look beyond the industrial narrative and current technological and economic focus to embrace local and Indigenous knowledge. The exhibition is structured in five themes; Water Stories, Bodily Waters, Invisible Water - Agriculture and Industry Thirsty Cities, Ecosystems - Land and Ocean, and aims to foreground natural systems and water justice to help shape a more imaginative and resilient water culture. 

A project by MK&G and Jane Withers Studio
Exhibition design: 51N4E, Exhibition graphics: Visual Fields
Photography by MAK and Henning Rogge

Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (MK&G), Hamburg , 15 March - 13 October 2024 View

Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 29 November 24 - 6 April 2025 View

MAK, Vienna, 21 May 2025 - 7 September 2025 View

Exhibition guide