Like a Flood is an audiovisual work by Italian-Libyan artist Adelita Husni Bey that, drawing on a recently rediscovered and reinterpreted photographic archive, investigates the consequences of the disruption of water supply in Libya — tracing the connections between the exploitation of water resources and the forced settlement policies enacted during the Italian colonial period (1911–1943).
Presented for the first time as a multimedia installation at the 16th Sharjah Biennial, the work arrives in Italy in national preview as a screening, through the collaboration between the curatorial platform LOCALES and Short Theatre 2026.
Adelita Husni Bey is also present at Short Theatre 2026 in dialogue with Sara Alberani (LOCALES) for the CLASSE Adelita Husni Bey & Sara Alberani e le ecologie del sommerso, also on September 10 at La Pelanda, after the screening.
Adelita Husni Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theatre, and critical legal studies. She organizes workshops and produces publications, broadcasts, and exhibition work using non-competitive pedagogical models through the framework of contemporary art. She has participated in Work it Out!, Aalborg Museum, 2021; Trainings for the Not Yet, BAK, Utrecht, 2020; Being: New Photography, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018; Dreamlands, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016; The Eighth Climate, 11th Gwangju Biennale, 2015. She was a Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics 2020-2022 where she developed These Conditions, 2022 at Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York, a hybrid space between exhibition venue, film set, and pedagogical space.
LOCALES is a curatorial platform founded in Rome in 2020 that aims to inspire a reflection on the public sphere through artistic practices. Through a series of site-specific programs involving commissions of new artworks, explorations of public spaces, educational activities, and performances, LOCALES addresses the complexity of contemporary urgencies starting from the political and social history of symbolic places in the city and their local communities. The current LOCALES team is composed of Sara Alberani, Chiara Siravo, Marta Federici, Chiara Pagano, Giulia Caruso, Alice Albanese Ginammi.
the film was commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation
made possible by the Italian Council 2024 programme
in collaboration with Alserkal Arts Foundation (Dubai) and MUCIV-Museo delle Civiltà (Rome)
with additional support from LOCALES
courtesy of Laveronica Arte Contemporanea
Adelita Husni Bey / LOCALES Adelita Husni Bey / LOCALES