The Arizona-born artist’s MOCA Tucson exhibition draws inspiration (and fluvial soil) from the Santa Cruz River, melding body and land with centrifugal force.
TUCSON, AZ—Karima Walker began her artistic career writing, singing, and performing folk songs, eventually branching out into video. But after a while, the Tucson-born artist wanted more. “I received nice feedback from everyone,” she says, as in, “‘Oh, your music is so beautiful.’ But I became interested in conveying something more complicated, rather than creating an experience consumed by a listener or viewer.” Walker’s first solo museum exhibition, Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, exemplifies that sense of complication by challenging viewers with a multi-media, and multi-sensory, expression of the contested Santa Cruz River.
The exhibition features a soundscape Walker recorded while installing the work, which comprises black benches and sitting pillows positioned around a series of concentric circles created as she poured fluvial soil she collected from the Santa Cruz River onto the floor. The sound piece captures stony dirt falling and furniture scraping on concrete, and footsteps shuffling through sand or planted intentionally in the grit. This is what one experiences when Walker isn’t present. When she’s engaged in one of her durational performances, which last for about two hours, she walks in slow, repetitive loops. Over time, the river soil she pours is aggregated into berms.Walker calls each performance a “grief ritual” that “is a confluence of life and death, as some viewers see the process of pouring the earth as seed dispersal, while others see ashes being scattered.”
The Santa Cruz River is a tributary of the Gila River in Southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico; it’s about 184 miles long. Water once freely flowed in the river, including along nine stretches in the Tucson area. But overgrazing, excessive pumping of water for agricultural irrigation and industry, the construction of dams and ditches, and other development caused the river to dry up completely. During monsoon season, some parts of the river have water. The City of Tucson and the Roger Road Waste Water Treatment Plant release treated wastewater into some parts. When the San Xavier Indian Reservation of the Tohono Oʼodham Nation received water from the Central Arizona Project in 2019, the tribe reduced its groundwater pumping.
Circles push against the notion of ‘progress,’ the motivation to grow bigger and ‘better,’ and the linear trajectory in that narrative.
“There are some stretches of river,” Walker says, “with lush riparian micro-climates for birds and other animals.” These areas, along with dry washes, became Walker’s studio during the Covid-19 pandemic. “I began a daily practice of walking or riding (my) bike alongside the river. It was a sustainable relationship where curiosity could develop. I noticed changes that would have been imperceptible in my usual patterns of life. The whole slowing down of everything, and paying attention, became the seeds of my museum installation.”
Creating the installation was an iterative process. Walker says she began by considering the river’s flow, the movement of a water wheel, and how water’s churn instigates movement and life. Eventually, she settled on circles, which are “contemplative,” she says. “The circle slowed things down. It felt more akin to ritual. And, importantly for me, circles push against the notion of ‘progress,’ the motivation to grow bigger and ‘better,’ and the linear trajectory in that narrative.” Circles provided, for Walker and the installation’s visitor “a holding pattern for a minute, an opportunity to sit where things are, with a looping that’s a constant return.” She says the resulting piece “models a relationship between me and the river.”
During her durational performances, Walker says she often feels “hyper-present and emptied out in terms of mind chatter.” While pouring the soil through her fingers, “I’m marveling at the river’s sensory presence.” She’s also aware of peoples’ presence. “There are moments when I’m curious about their experience. It is a somber ritual. Are they bored? When people stay a while, that’s rewarding.” Then she laughs: “And sometimes I feel like a host hoping my guests are okay.”
Working in an interdisciplinary practice integrating installation, sound, visuals, materiality, and performance, Walker says, allows her to “follow ideas and questions and research into whatever material or situation arises,” with results that invariably challenge the viewer to a level of participation beyond passive consumption. As a student earning her MFA in Expanded Arts at Arizona State University in Tempe, Walker is acquiring new skill sets, she says, and is “thinking about ways to extend performance at the interface of body and land. I’m in experimental mode.” She’s taking a look at large-scale, public infrastructures for future performances that engage viewers as collaborators. She wonders “how I can insert the body into these massive, monolithic things. I’m considering new situations, new strategies, for intimate moments.”
Karima Walker’s final performances of Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain at MOCA Tucson are on January 12 and February 2 at 2 p.m. The exhibition runs through February 16, 2025.
