© Sue Ponce, Cortesia CA2M
Inês Zenha
Murky Waters
Inês Zenha presents the exhibition ‘Murky Waters’ at the CA2M Museum in Madrid, which will travel to CAM in September 2026.
Inês Zenha (Lisbon, 1995) presents a first institutional solo exhibition in Spain (27 September 2025 to 11 January 2026). Curated by João Mourão and Luís Silva, this immersive exhibition features works in painting, sculpture and installation. Using materials such as adobe, ceramics and water, Zenha invites the public on a journey through hybrid bodies and beings, reservoirs, drainage and runoff systems, both urban and bodily.
Inês Zenha’s multidisciplinary work combines a variety of techniques and focuses on the body and its representation, exploring issues of queer identity, desire and vulnerability. Through this work, Zenha questions social norms, offering a poetic and critical reflection on the fluidity and resilience of the body. Zenha’s recent projects delve into the intersections between power, transformation, and the creation of new ontologies for marginalised identities.
Zenha’s works offer a moving meditation that explores the diffuse spatial negotiations that the queer navigates. These reveal complex relationships between the body – simultaneously sacred and profane – and water, as well as other bodily fluids. Here, liquids become powerful metaphors, symbolising the urgency of dissolving divisions and dismantling discrimination, transforming these spaces into gestures of love.
‘Murky Waters’ resists notions of purity, creating a space for what the hygienic imagination seeks to suppress: the monstrous, the animal, the obscure, the foreign, the feminine, and the queer. Zenha takes us underground, to the throat, revealing the monster that speaks, the monster that feels. There is, then, a liberation of the body from its traditional representation, creating a new iconography.
The exhibition, co-produced with CA2M, arrives at Project Space at CAM on 19 September 2026.