Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain Performance
June 1, 2025
1:00 PM
Free
Artist and musician Karima Walker performs as a part of her installation Graves for the Rain on view in the current exhibition Frequencies. The work features a site-responsive 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 responsive 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. Audio is collected live within the gallery space and the body of the sculpture: data like volume and amplitude sourced from the sounds occurring in the gallery and the impact of the artist’s footsteps on the sculpture alter and abstract properties of the looping track, triggering moments of accumulation and dissipation – which the artist refers to as a “sonic eddy.”
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, the performance action and attendant audio unsettle linear conceptions of progress and instead practices a sustained relationship with land.
Performances are durational and open-format: visitors are invited to 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 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.
About the Exhibition
Frequencies is an exhibition featuring a group of contemporary artists who explore the dynamic possibilities of sound. These artists attend to the audible and inaudible traces of the world to create works across sculpture, architecture, video, performance, and image. Artists included are Alluvium, Vivian Caccuri, Sofía Córodva, Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez, Nikita Gale, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Sara Ouhaddou, Adrian Piper, Ana Paula Santana, Naama Tsabar, and Karima Walker. The exhibition also features Channeling the Ear, a dedicated space for intimate listening experiences featuring a selection of albums by artists and musicians such as AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti), Maryanne Amacher, Jessica Ekomane, Christine Sun Kim, Katalin Ladik, Lime Rickey International (Leyya Mona Tawil), Audra Wolowiec, and selections from the collection of Nothing to Commit Records, a research and publishing platform founded by guest curator Bhavisha Panchia.