Extended Hours
The dark water keeps our names
With Laura Partin
Alejandra Sanchez Mack
The sea and the myths it has inspired across cultures and centuries are brought together in The Dark Water Keeps Our Names, a curated exhibition by London-based curator Alejandra Sanchez Mack featuring the work of Romanian artist Laura Partin.
The collection is part of the artist’s ongoing body of work Mar Adentro, in which mythological figures from different parts of the world are reimagined through her distinctive contemporary drawing practice. Some are reinterpreted through a feminist lens, challenging traditional portrayals that have cast these figures as dangerous, weak, or responsible for male misfortune, and reframing them with renewed agency – including Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, born from the sea, reimagined here as a warrior; the Camenae, Roman nymphs whose voices carried poetry, healing, and wisdom; the Siren, originally the bird-women of Greek myth, is rethought as a figure of knowledge and voice rather than seduction or deception, whose song carries truths denied to women and refuses to take blame for others’ weakness; and Toyotama-hime, the Japanese sea princess whose tragic love story is reinterpreted from her perspective, reclaiming the emotional complexity of a myth long told through the eyes of others.
These mythological creatures are embedded within the collection as characters witnessing a constantly changing world where climate change, pollution, and environmental degradation continue to threaten aquatic biodiversity. The art of storytelling, particularly through myth, is a dying practice. There is little room for it in our fast-paced overstimulated world, one that exploits natural resources to sustain increasingly synthetic ways of living. However, the exhibition does not seek to make us feel guilty for what has been lost. While many of the ongoing changes may now be irreversible, awareness is the first step in pushing back, redirecting attention toward recovering a sense of safety and creative freedom shaped by ancestral relationships with the sea and the myths it inspired
