Hajra Waheed: There Is a Fountain Even If Pale That Flows Beneath Us All

Spring 2026 at Kunstinstituut Melly

This spring, Kunstinstituut Melly presents a new season of exhibitions opening across April and May 2026. On 18 April, two solo exhibitions open as part of the ongoing series Call & Response. A group exhibition, Draw Redraw Withdraw, will follow on 23 May.

Call & Response

Call & Response brings artists into proximity whose practices resonate with one another. The series reflects Kunstinstituut Melly’s commitment to supporting artists whose work engages with geopolitical demands while imagining new possibilities. This season presents exhibitions by Hajra Waheed and by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. In both, the artists situate viewers within ongoing conditions that call for sustained attention and attunement, attesting to sound as both a political and liberatory force.

There Is a Fountain Even If Pale That Flows Beneath Us All

Opening 18 April 2026

Guest curated by Hera Chan

Hajra Waheed is a multidisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, sound, sculpture, video, and installation. Her practice explores the nature of power, the human impact of displacement and incarceration, and the transformative possibilities of liberation struggles.

There Is a Fountain Even If Pale That Flows Beneath Us All brings together newly commissioned and recent works that approach listening as an embodied, collective, and political practice. The title invokes an undercurrent that persists beneath regimes of repression, where expression defiantly circulates despite attempts to silence it.

At the center is Hum (2020), the first volume in Waheed’s trilogy of multichannel sound installations, which foregrounds political prisoners as leaders of liberation struggles and traces voice under conditions of incarceration. The singers and songwriters featured in the work have all been imprisoned—their work censored, with many forced into exile for mobilizing collective voice. The songs are drawn from a period, as today, marked by state violence and genocide, mass uprisings, and crackdowns. From this shared condition of silencing, the work turns to humming as both a compositional method and a language of resistance.

In parallel to Hum, the exhibition presents a series of sound studies; drawings, paintings, handbound artist books, and leporellos—many shown for the first time. Created over the years alongside sound chamber designs for Hum, these works extend Waheed’s sonic practice across mediums, where line, mark, and landscape become shared fields of attunement.