STILL WATERS RUN DEEP16mm film and installation featuring hanging roll of paper and custom made stamps, 2024-2025
Still Waters Run Deep is a spatial and cinematic installation composed of a large-scale stamped paper work and a short film, forming a unified visual and sensory environment. The repeated stamping of a single phrase becomes both image and rhythm, transforming language into material, pattern, and surface. The work centers on the port as both symbol and structure: a site of passage, control, extraction, and memory, born from the undercurrents of global trade, migration, and historical violence, refracted through Beirut’s fractured shoreline. Water becomes a space of research and an archive of movement, carrying histories of displacement, circulation, and exploitation beneath a surface that appears calm. Through repetition and restraint, the work traces invisible systems shaping bodies and geographies, from colonial routes and economic flows to personal and collective trajectories. The notion of “still waters” becomes a critical metaphor, exposing how apparent stability conceals submerged histories and hidden violence, echoing port cities like Liverpool, where prosperity was built on the slave trade. Rather than narrating directly, the work allows meaning to sediment slowly, forming a quiet, dense meditation on depth, memory, and what persists beneath the visible surface.
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The Beiruter:
Still waters run deep: Beirut Art Center’s exploration into ports, power, and preservation. Siska’s "Still Water Runs Deep" reflects ports' histories of migration, trauma, and economic exploitation.
By Katharine Sorensen | December 02, 2025
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