Water Stories with Harvard South Asian Music Association
Join musicians from Harvard South Asian Music Association (SAMA) as they present an overview of and showcase of selected pieces in the Carnatic musical genre, an ancient classical art form originating in South India. The rāgam Amrutavarshinī, traditionally believed to invoke rain, will be featured in the performance. The session will include music, commentary, and light refreshments.
This event engages with the exhibition Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis, on view September 18–December 16, 2023. Water Stories presents artworks that tell alternative stories of water experience. They treat water not as a commodity to be exploited but as a cyclical, life-giving, life-dissolving, and inert but innately alive spiritual force—a view widely shared among Indigenous communities, especially in the Global South. The exhibition juxtaposes older, traditional paintings depicting myths with works by contemporary artists that evoke various aesthetic experiences of water in the age of climate crisis. Water Stories encourages viewers to appreciate the multivalent meaning of water and to contemplate their own relationship with it.
Immediately prior to this performance, please visit the Water Stories exhibition in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery in Byerly Hall (8 Garden Street) from 5 to 5:30 PM.
See companion website for the exhibition.
Free and open to the public.
Please register to attend in person.
