The word ‘rival’ once referred to those who shared a ‘rivus’ (the same water or channel): people whose lives were linked not through conflict but through interbeing.

A river runs through presents new works by Spence Messih that trace the intertwined currents of water and gender. Working across sculpture, print, and film, Messih develops a material language shaped by tension, movement and contradiction.

Set against the backdrop of contemporary ‘gender panic’—a climate in which trans bodies are scapegoated to distract from deeper political, social, economic and environmental crises—the exhibition draws parallels between human and ecological vulnerabilities. Both are monitored, categorised and disciplined, and both are shaped by cultural and economic forces that determine who is afforded complexity and who, or what, becomes a subject of fear and control.

By drawing connections between the straightening and exploitation of rivers and the regulation of gender, the works invite us to consider how both resist efforts to be fixed, contained or simplified. Messih’s works turn toward the places where binaries fray, proposing that gender and water are always multiple: cultural and economic, spiritual and historical, lived and inherited, material and symbolic.

Today, to be cast as a rival or an adversary is to be perceived as a threat not only to others but to capitalism and life itself. This is not a neat analogy between gender and water, but an invitation to stay with their struggles, their autonomy, and their resistance to being fixed or fully known.