As part of VIENNA ART WEEK, Ashley Hunt’s latest film will be on view at the HOUSE OF LEARNING SYSTEMS – take this opportunity and join us!

And Water Brings Tomorrow (2025)
Ashley Hunt

Digital video, TRT 1 hour 47 min, United States

The third in a film cycle on today’s abolition movement through the lens of closing prisons, including Ashes Ashes (2020) and Double Time (2022), And Water Brings Tomorrow tells this story against the backdrop of climate forces that are changing our world.

It follows the ‘Close California Prisons Campaign’ of the CURB coalition (Californians United for a Responsible Budget), an interfaith pilgrimage to close immigrant detention centers in the Southwest, and an effort to halt the building of a new prison in Appalachian coal country.

Juxtaposed with portraits of prisons that have become museums, restorative justice centers, tourism hubs and anonymous ruins, the film is woven together with a poetic narration on what is reckoned with or erased in each prison’s repurposing.

Biography

Ashley Hunt is an artist and educator. Over the last 25 years, he has dedicated his socially-engaged art practice to documenting the expansion of the U.S. prison system and resistance to it by communities, and increasingly, the natural world. While tracing the proliferation of prisons across the nation and their place in the landscape, Hunt also explores how the public is trained to not see the effects of incarceration all around them, looking to artistic strategies to render them visible and changeable.

Director: Ashley Hunt
Producers: Ashley Hunt, Evelyn Hang Yin
Director of Photography: Ashley Hunt
Assistant Camera: Josiah Green, Syd Canty
Voiceover Performer: Oscar Ochoa
Research: C. Bain
Marketing Manager: Emiko Wilks