Wicket Gate

In a city built upon a meticulously engineered relationship with water, where the subsoil tells a story of prehistoric riverbanks and deep peat, the urgency of reimagining our future is felt acutely. Amsterdam’s very existence is a testament to controlling flow—of water, of people, of capital. How do we navigate new geopolitical currents from this low-lying delta?

Jamilah Sabur presents Wicket Gate (2025), a new body of work centered on eight photographs hand-printed in manganese chloride by The ƒ/Ø Project [f-zero], a printmaking and publishing studio based in Los Angeles, and housed in custom-made frames. A critical mineral of our time, manganese chloride electrifies the modern world, serving as a fundamental component in battery technology and a cornerstone of industrial manufacturing. For an audience familiar with the layers of history beneath their feet, Sabur’s Wicket Gate resonates deeply. It brings together archival images from a 1966 deep-sea mission aboard the USNS Eltanin in the Antarctic Ocean—a voyage that surveyed the seabed, a realm as alien and foundational as the sand, clay, and peat layers upon which Amsterdam rests—alongside Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) photographs of turbine wicket gates, the very kind that regulate water with a precision that echoes the city’s own sluices and dams.

Sabur traces the transmutation of the wicket form across time, linking it to embodiment, water, and language. Originally designed to regulate flow, the wicket gate collides with manganese nodules carpeting the ocean floor—critical mineral resources extracted from contested waters, much like the resources that fuel the port of Europe just west of the city. Through this work, Sabur interrogates how the logics of extraction and exploration, so inherent to the Dutch maritime identity, shape our understanding of borders, ownership, and planetary stewardship. As she exposes these systems, Wicket Gate urges us to confront the impossibility of infinite extraction on a finite planet—a vital dialogue for a nation whose prosperity is literally grounded in the delicate balance of holding back the sea.