t is no coincidence that all the major cities of the world are situated on the banks of rivers: Cairo on the Nile, London on the Thames, New York on the Hudson, New Delhi on the Jamuna, Lahore on the Ravi, Shanghai on the Yangtze, Vienna on the Danube, Rome on the Tiber, Paris on the Seine, Cologne on the Rhine, Baghdad on the Tigris, and so forth. These cities belong to countries which are distinguished by their independent identities. In that sense the rivers are also associated with specific peoples, regions and cultures.

In naming rivers, people turned them into significant segments/ symbols of unique and separate countries. However, all the waterways are joined to seas and oceans, much like the body of a human being with limbs and organs of various sizes, shapes and functions, connected with blood that passes from one part to other through a network of veins and arteries.

Recognising this aspect (which many fail to realise or forget), Risham Syed created a multi-format work for the inauguration of Manchester International Festival on June 29. Each Tiny Drop, physically mixes waters from two places; which are far in distance yet joined by their (colonial) histories. However, the relationship of the UK and South Asia is not a thing of the past; it continues on several levels. The wide use of English language for official, educational, literary and commercial purposes in the subcontinent; and the demography of several British cities (including Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford) remind us that the two societies are inseparable.

Risham Syed developed her project (the latest of annually proposed by important artists, for example Yoko Ono’s Bells for Peace 2019) around the displacement, ecology, identities, languages and sound. In conversation with a number of individuals from the Manchester International Festival, including John McGrath, the artistic director and CEO; Low Knee Hong, the creative director; and Alnoor Mitha, the curator; Syed mapped a profoundly complex work that involved text, music, performance, site-specific installation and public participation. Collaborating with other creative practitioners such as Dan Jones, the sound designer; Beth Allen, the music director; and Savinder Bual, the artist known for her kinetic sculptures; Syed has produced something that demolishes the limits, boundaries and classifications of genres, locations and audience’s interaction with the work, the word and the world.

Situated in the Mayfair Park next to the Medlock River, Each Tiny Drop unravels many truths and assumptions about our present-day situation. This is the first park built in Manchester in a century. The Medlock River, which in the past had turned into a virtual sewer, was recently cleaned into a clear water current. Syed’s project was linked to the Park’s opening as well as the celebration of the River’s rebirth. The work was more about transcending a geography trapped in maps through shared histories, tales, texts, tunes and experiences.

For this project, Syed took a small quantity of water from the Soan River of the Punjab to Manchester, where it was blended with the waters of Medlock River. Not surprisingly, water from the two sources with a distance of 8,720 kilometres in-between, was found to be the same; like the blood of a woman from Wah and a man from Manchester. Syed’s jar of water was mixed with the local liquid, and through Savinder Paul’s installation of rotating sculptures, offered to visitors, who collected it in tiny terracotta pots, to take it along the paths of Mayfair Park till they dropped the ‘foreign-infested’ fluid into the English stream.

Each Tiny Drop, situated in the Mayfair Park, especially around the Medlock River, unravels many truths and assumptions about our present day situation. It is the first park built in Manchester in a century.

The work of Risham Syed, with its meticulously devised plan and thoroughly designed course of audience’s responses, levitated from a specific space, and a certain time. It conveys a simple fact. Water, in spite of differences and distances of origins, areas and other variables, is essentially the same. In some parts of the world it appears to be turquoise, in others blue, or grey, green or muddy; but in its essence water is colourless – that is why the ancient Greeks didn’t call it blue. Wherever Homer mentions the sea he describes it as “wine-like” or “the dark wave”; because he and our ancestors knew that water, regardless of its location, is colourless. A simple experiment can verify this: one can collect water from the Mediterranean Sea, Caspian Sea, Dead Sea, Red Sea and the Arabian Sea to find out that water from the shore of Karachi, Cote d’Azur, Sharm El-Sheikh, Jerusalem and Baku is similarly transparent.

When Risham Syed dispatches water from a small river in a plateau region of the Punjab to an industrial town in the UK, she also refers to other sources – from sacred to mundane. Pilgrims carry the Zamzam to their various lands on their return. Likewise, the Ganges water is respectfully collected and sent to places as far as North America, Australia, and the Europe.

But only small amounts of water can be brought from one place to another. So it has to be combined (contaminated?) with local streams; like hajis mixing their import with tap-water in some Karachi neighbourhood, or an NRI adding mineral water to Ganga Jal sent by their parents.

In her work, which dealt with differences, displacements and disorientation, Risham Syed introduced the element of music: the sound that carries humans across borders; like water, breeze, aeroplanes – and mobile phones. For her project, with the help of Dan Jones, a choir was formed that sang the following lines of Guru Nanak: “With air as guide, water as father/ Earth as all-embracing mother/ With day and night as baby sitters/ The entire world is engrossed in play.” Syed also reordered the following verses of poet Najm Hosain Syed: “My dear ocean, listen/ Our sons departed to earn/ They live, filling water for the mighty….. / Our words are the waters of Soan.”

This piece of poetry, penned in 1997, is a cartography of our contemporary existence, where a group of illegal migrants, crossing from one region (Asia/ Africa) to anther (Europe) were drowned on June 18, 2023, near the cost of Greece. Like a prophesy, the poet had written : “Sort, now, this half-truth of a life/ My dear ocean, listen.”

Syed, in a sense, made the ocean listen when water from a far off river arrived in a jar at the Mayfair Park. It, and the visitors at her installation, listened to the choir (comprising untrained singers from a multicultural community) and the artist singing Syed’s poem. As water from the Punjab was deposited into the water of North West England, so were the sounds – lines from Guru Nanak and Najm Hosain Syed – mingled, merged and morphed with the (amplified) sounds of birds, breeze, water at another land; not unlike the population of several British cities, of South Asian descent who stitch their current place of living into their distant homelands, in their cuisines, costumes, music and dialects.

Syed’s work is about recognising, respecting and replenishing aesthetic practices across cultures and continents. Bringing something from home, to another – promised - land was a way to maintain equality, identity and individuality in a multitude; usually observed in the London Underground. It was witnessed by more than 950 visitors to this project for a diverse, yet united, Manchester.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore