Installation view of Never The Same River at Ford Foundation Gallery, where painting, photography, sculpture, and moving image examine migration, memory, and identity. Photo: Sebastian Bach
Never The Same River at the Ford Foundation Gallery considers migration, borders, and identity through painting, photography, sculpture, and video.
BY KAZAEEM ADELEKE, ARTCENTRON
At a moment when migration, borders, and questions of bodily agency remain central to public debate, Never The Same River brings those subjects into the gallery through painting, photography, sculpture, and moving images.
On view at the Ford Foundation Gallery, Never The Same River is curated by Dexter Wimberly and explores themes of bodily autonomy and human migration. The exhibition features six artists—KV Duong, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Brendan Fernandes, Elliot & Erick Jiménez, Anoushka Mirchandani, and Edison Peñafiel—who use painting, photography, sculpture, and moving image to consider what happens when people, identities, and histories are forced to move.
Rather than treating migration as a single journey from one place to another, Never The Same River considers movement as something that continues long after crossing a border. Memory travels. Cultural traditions change. Bodies are viewed differently in different places. The past can remain present even when geography has shifted.
The title draws on the ancient philosophical idea attributed to Heraclitus: no one steps into the same river twice. The river changes, but so does the person entering it. Here, that proposition becomes a framework for thinking about identity as unstable, embodied, and continually remade.
The river is therefore less a literal subject than a conceptual device. It becomes a way of thinking about permanence in a world defined by transition. The metaphor also resonates with contemporary artistic investigations of borders and water as mechanisms of control.
What is Never The Same River About?
The central question of Never The Same River is not simply where people move. It is what happens to identity when movement changes the relationship between body, place, and memory.
The artists approach that question from markedly different perspectives. Their geographic and cultural connections span Vietnam, Canada, the United Kingdom, Kenya, India, Cuba, Ecuador, and the United States. Yet the exhibition does not reduce their practices to autobiography. Instead, personal histories become starting points for broader questions about belonging, representation, power, and self-definition.
That distinction is important. Migration here extends beyond a single political category. It is a condition that can involve exile, diaspora, inheritance, assimilation, memory, and choice. Over time, artists have used migration to question movement, instability, and the persistence of identity across borders.
Six Artists Approach Migration from Different Directions
KV Duong examines diaspora and representation through materials loaded with historical and cultural associations. His Family Portrait (2026) begins with images of his extended family in Vietnam in 1986, their final year together there. The five-panel work fragments, multiplies, and transforms those faces through painting and latex. The result feels less like a conventional family portrait than an unstable archive of belonging.
The use of latex adds another layer. As curator Dexter Wimberly has noted, the material carries associations with Vietnam’s colonial rubber industry as well as sensual and queer histories. Duong turns those overlapping meanings into part of the work’s meditation on visibility and Asian identity in Western culture.
Adama Delphine Fawundu takes a more expansive geographical approach. Her practice connects African and diasporic histories through photography, video, and self-representation. Ngewo Whispers places a solitary figure within a Southern landscape, while Vibrations from the Deep links bodies of water and locations across Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. The latter work was filmed across multiple countries, including Nigeria, Congo, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Cuba, Brazil, and the United States.
Relationship Between Bodies, Discipline, and Cultural Histories
For Brendan Fernandes, movement becomes physical. His practice frequently considers the relationship between bodies, discipline, and cultural histories. Still Release II, from 2019, uses a rocking chair as both sculpture and performance device. The work transforms a familiar domestic object into an instrument of bodily control, bringing endurance and fatigue into the conversation about agency.
Elliot & Erick Jiménez approach migration through family history, spirituality, and inherited cultural memory. Their Where Fertile Land Grows (2026) combines photography, a nineteenth-century church bench, and ornate framing. The work draws together Lucumí traditions, Catholic imagery, and art-historical references. Made especially for the show, it becomes a meditation on how cultural identities can overlap rather than resolve into a single narrative.
Anoushka Mirchandani’s paintings similarly resist the idea of identity as settled. Her figures appear to dissolve into their surroundings, producing a visual language of partial visibility. Family archives and the history of her grandmothers, who experienced forced displacement during the 1947 Partition of India, inform her wider exploration of migration, memory, and inherited identity.
Edison Peñafiel brings migration into moving images. MARE MAGNVM: Passage presents masked, anonymous figures in perpetual movement across a projected sea. Peñafiel’s broader MARE MAGNVM project uses 81 archetypal figures whose identities remain deliberately unlocatable. Their endless movement refuses the familiar narrative structure in which migration begins with departure and ends with arrival.
Bodies, Borders and the Politics of Self-Definition
A recurring concern across Never The Same River is who gets to determine the meaning of a body.
That question connects migration to bodily autonomy. The artists examine the cultural expectations, political structures, and historical narratives projected onto people according to gender, race, sexuality, nationality, or place of origin.
The works do not treat autonomy as an abstract political slogan. They approach it through bodies, movement, performance, family photographs, and personal memory.
Migration consequently becomes both physical and psychological. A person can cross a border while continuing to negotiate assumptions attached to where they came from. Cultural assimilation can alter how identity is perceived. Family memory can preserve experiences that official histories leave incomplete.
The exhibition’s most compelling idea is therefore that movement does not necessarily produce a clean break. Instead, one history can continue inside another.
Why Never The Same River Matters in New York Now
The timing gives Never The Same River particular resonance.
Migration remains one of the defining social and political issues of the present. Public debates over borders, displacement, and asylum can reduce individual experiences to numbers, legal categories, or political arguments. The artists gathered at the Ford Foundation Gallery offer another perspective: one centered on memory, embodiment, and personal agency.
That approach is consistent with the Ford Foundation Gallery’s stated mission. The gallery describes art as a means of confronting difficult social questions and giving visibility to marginalized experiences.
The exhibition also benefits from its range of media. Painting sits beside photography, sculpture, and moving image rather than operating as separate categories. That variety reinforces the show’s central proposition: identity cannot easily be contained by a single fixed form.
There is a productive tension here. Never The Same River addresses migration through works that are deeply specific to individual histories, yet the exhibition continually pushes those histories toward larger questions. What survives when people move? How do they relate to changes? What is inherited? And who has the authority to define the person who arrives?
The river offers no final answer. Its significance lies precisely in its refusal to remain still. The exhibition consequently asks viewers to consider migration as an ongoing condition rather than a completed event.
For visitors interested in contemporary art, migration, and identity, Never The Same River offers more than a thematic survey. Its central metaphor becomes an invitation to reconsider the assumption that people, places, or identities can ever remain unchanged.
The river keeps moving. So do the histories carried within it.
Never The Same River: Bodies, Borders and Memory
Never The Same River is on view at the Ford Foundation Gallery, 320 East 43rd Street, New York, through December 5, 2026. The Ford Foundation also provides access to a digital exhibition guide through Bloomberg Connects.