Mast: Lecture Performance by Adelita Husni-Bey

Adelita Husni Bey will present a lecture performance of her recent research on water infrastructure, drawing from her work Like a Flood (2025), currently on view at the Sharjah Biennial 16, supported by Alserkal Arts Foundation.
Her performative lecture explores the archives of the Italian Institute for Africa and the Orient (ISIAO), tracing the movement and concealment of materials related to Italy’s looting of Libya.
Weaving in elements of her own family history, Husni Bey examines how water infrastructure—often rendered invisible—has shaped population settlement, imperialist expansion, and colonial ventures, with profound reverberations in the present.
About the Artist
Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue whose practice is grounded in anarcho-collectivism, theatre and legal anthropology. Through workshops and artworks rooted in noncompetitive pedagogical models, she engages a broad spectrum of participants, including activists, architects, jurists, schoolchildren, poets, actors and urbanists. Her practice emphasises collective experimentation and critical reflection on sociopolitical systems and structures.
The artist’s work has been exhibited at various institutional and non-institutional venues, including the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). As a Vera List Center Fellow (2020–2022), she investigated the social transformations prompted by pandemics through a purpose-built maze structure that served as a dynamic space for workshops and lectures.
For Sharjah Biennial 16, she collaborated with researcher Shehrazade Mahassini on a film installation that explores water extraction, infrastructure and the politics of adaptability, addressing environmental crises shaped by contemporary economic systems and their histories.

This lecture performance is commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation & Alserkal Arts Foundation.
Image details: IsIAO (Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente) photo archive, Libya, n°1-B-II. Agriculture, Indigenous wells and various wells. "Gimti MIssin Well" (trans.). Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale ‘Vittorio Emanuele II’ di Roma, Fototeca IsIAO – Sala delle Collezioni Africane e Orientali, Rome.

Host or Publisher Alserkal Arts Foundation