ABOUT ANJA MARAIS

Welcome, dear visitor.

I am a forager. I saunter through the world collecting stories, earth-talks, and myths. Gathered from frayed memories and faded auditories. I seek objects left behind and forgotten with a leitmotiv of history.

I explore exposed objects, systems, and ideas after disintegration. I bring these weathered objects and subjects together as hybrids in my studio to be reinvented in sculptures, installations, video work, photography, and poetry. My process revives, transforms, and reinterprets, leading to a new understanding of cultural phenomena of false supremacies and fragmented heritages. I call this process the ‘Beginning of the End to a Re-beginning‘.

I have a zero-waste studio practice where I work with cyclical earthy materials like clay, lime, stone, maize, and found objects. Uninterested in the boundary between the human and the nonhuman world, my work states that all things–inanimate and animate–contain metamorphoses of personhood. It is impossible not to hear the world in its objects.

Warmly,

Anja

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(photocredit Ana Carballosa)

NEWS

Open Studios at Sculpture Space, NY

Art Residency Open Studio Dear Enthusiast of the Arts, I am inviting you to an open studio event to view my latest work alongside the rest of the Winter cohort: katya Grokhovsky  Cseko Julia and Jose Porgo. You can see more documentation on the residency at @anjammarais YOU'RE INVITED THIS WEDNESDAY March 9 • 5:30pm (this event is FREE to the public) Shifting Grounds of the Tongueless. ⸭◈⸭ Material is an [...]

Art Opening & Poetry Reading at Helene Wurlitzer

My outdoor exhibition Chairhenge (How to Sleep Through Falling Silences) will open this Saturday, December 4th at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. The text of Steve Biko and other African poets will accompany the interactive art installation. Because of COVID regulations, we ask that you bring your own earphones for the audio experience. I have collected found objects between Californian and New Mexican refuse centers and sculpted layers of traditional [...]

Earthtalk a ritual-installation: An obeisance to the Ancestral wisdom of the Mother.

"What would change if we took seriously the consideration that the world is alive, that we derive our being from a never-static, ever-changing field of entanglements, and that we are not the center of the universe?" Dr. Bayo Akomolafe The preamble of my Earthtalk journey. The intersection of installation and ritual. Listening to Earth, hearing the Ancestral, and connecting with the Femme Consciousness. We documented this performance on traditionally [...]