Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain Performance

Artist and musician Karima Walker performs as a part of her exhibition Graves for the Rain. The exhibition features an immersive audio piece and evolving earthen sculpture generated by Walker’s performances in the gallery to consider the hydrological death of the Santa Cruz River and its uncertain future. Walker’s durational performances are grief rituals for the river; recurring acts of tending that grow the sculpture over time.

In the gallery, a sound piece surrounds a ring-shaped sculpture composed of fluvial soil—organic material that has been moved by water within a river—collected by Walker from the Santa Cruz’s riverbed. During each performance, the artist walks directly on the surface of the sculpture, following its circular path in the direction of the river’s flow while scattering fluvial soil. With each repeated circuit layers of river soil accumulate, marking Walker’s movements and building up the sculptural body in the gallery space.

For the artist, walking in circles is simultaneously a futile act and the shape of ritual; through repetition and duration, this action unsettles linear conceptions of progress and instead practices a sustained relationship with land. The ring-shaped sculpture that emerges from Walker’s actions evokes a berm or basin: human-scale formations that are made to harvest rainwater, and which reference the artist’s ongoing embodied practices that engage land and rain.

Performances are durational and open-format: visitors are invited to respectfully enter and exit the space at their own discretion. During performances, the artist continually moves soil. This action may generate dust within the gallery during and immediately following performances. Face masks are available at the front desk.

About Graves for the Rain

Graves for the Rain is the first solo museum exhibition by artist and musician Karima Walker who works with sound, sculpture, and durational performance to consider ecological practices and grief in response to the hydrological death of the Santa Cruz River. Through recurring performances, Walker builds up an earthen sculpture and an immersive audio piece, accumulating layers of river material over the course of the exhibition. Informed by the history of human intervention to the river and her ongoing sonic engagement with the landscape, Walker seeks to understand the ways we relate to the land. Attuning to the river through listening and movement, she states, “I’m holding the microphone up to the river’s mouth, circling and circling, grieving in the absence of the body. Can I hear what the river is saying?”

About the artist

Karima Walker is an artist and musician living in Arizona. She works with research, performance, materials, video, and sound to critically position the mythologies, practices, and policies that shape perceptions and relationships to land. A touring musician for the past 10 years, her work has been featured in Pitchfork, NPR, MTV and The New Yorker Radio Hour. She holds certifications in Deep Listening and Rainwater Harvesting and is currently pursuing an MFA in Expanded Arts at Arizona State University.

Image Credit: Performance process documentation, Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain, MOCA Tucson, September 13, 2024. Photographs by Julius Schlosburg, copyright © jpop photon, 2024.