Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain
September 13, 2024 – February 16, 2025
East Wing Galleries
This is the first solo museum exhibition by artist and musician Karima Walker who works with sound, sculpture, and durational performance to respond to the hydrological death of the Santa Cruz River. Informed by the history of human intervention to the river and her sustained sonic engagement with the landscape, Walker creates an immersive audio piece and builds up an earthen sculpture that accumulates layers of river material and the artist’s footprints over the course of the exhibition.
Extending through Southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico, the Santa Cruz River has been a source of surface and groundwater for Indigenous peoples for millenia through the present day. Over the past 150 years it was used by the growing city of Tucson, until its ecosystem was destroyed in the early twentieth century. The river has undergone periods of exploitation, channelization, and restoration in relation to civic development and in 2024 was named one of the most endangered rivers in the United States. This designation raises questions about the future of the river and the complex, discordant, collision of stakeholders engaged in its development and restoration.
The installation consists of a sound piece that surrounds a ring-shaped sculpture composed of fluvial soil—organic material that has been moved by water within a river—collected by the artist from the Santa Cruz’s riverbed. These elements are sonic reverberations and physical markers of a series of performances during which the artist walks a circular path in the direction of the river’s flow while scattering fluvial soil onto the floor. Audio recordings of these movements play continuously around the sculpture, sustaining Walker’s path-making in the space between each performance. Her repeated circuits are a grief ritual for the river; recurring acts of tending that grow the sculpture over time.
Shaped by Walker’s background as a performer and her ongoing practices with land, the installation privileges gradual change and sonic experience over a static visual object. In these ways, the work encourages us to be with the sensations and associations that surface when we turn our attention to sound, movement, and material change over an extended period of time.
Generated through performances that merge burial and growth, the earthen sculpture and circulating sound piece create a space to pause, gather, and listen at the edge of an evolving landscape. Graves for the Rain is an invitation to consider individual and collective relations to the river, asking “what new questions and situations become possible when we bring the river to us? When we come to the river?”
Process-performances by the artist will take place in the gallery throughout the exhibition’s duration beginning at the opening reception on Friday, September 13 at 8pm; and on Sundays at 2pm, on November 3, December 8, January 12, and February 2.
These 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 fluvial soil. This action may generate dust within the gallery during and immediately following performances. Face masks are available at the front desk.
Graves for the Rain is organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Curator.
This project is supported in part by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, which receives support from the State of Arizona and the National Endowment for the Arts. Generous support for this exhibition is also provided by the Mellon Foundation and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members.
In-kind support provided by Danny Vinik and Mary Ann Brazil and the Downtown Clifton Hotel.
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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, 2024. Photographs by Julius Schlosburg, copyright © jpop photon, 2024.