TUCSON, AZ.- MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) presents Graves for the Rain, 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 and sound 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?”

The Santa Cruz River extends through Southern Arizona and Sonora, Mexico. The river has been a source of surface and groundwater for Indigenous peoples for millenia through the present day, and over the past 150 years for 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—that includes the artist and the museum in their engagement with the river for this project.

Walker situates her body in relation to the water body through recurring performances that introduce fluvial soil—referring broadly to soil that has been moved by water within a river or channel—collected from the Santa Cruz’s riverbed into the museum’s gallery. The performances are conceived as grief rituals where Walker engages the river’s material to enact a slow burial and an ongoing practice of tending. The artist walks in a circular path in the direction of the river’s flow while releasing the fluvial soil to the floor, materially marking her movements. With each repeated performance the earthen sculpture will grow, becoming a temporary landscape shaped by the gallery’s architecture and Walker’s looping circuits. For the artist, walking in circles is simultaneously a futile act and the shape of ritual; through repetition, this action unsettles linear conceptions of progress and instead practices a sustained relationship to land. The ring-shaped sculpture that emerges from Walker’s repeated 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.

Audio documentation of Walker’s path-making movements—the sound of earth falling and her footprints as they are laid, buried, and re-laid—plays continuously through speakers that surround the sculpture, panning in a circular direction that echoes Walker’s path in her absence. Through repetitions, loops, and cycles, Walker generates a site that is always in flux, alternating between states of process, accumulation, and rest.

Graves for the Rain offers a place to pause, gather, and listen at the edge of an evolving landscape. With ongoing performances that merge burial and growth, Walker attends to the river’s past and orients toward its future: an invitation to consider individual and collective relations with the river, asking “what new questions and situations become possible when we come to the river? When we bring the river to us?”

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 7pm; 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 a durational project that continually evolves within MOCA’s East Wing Gallery. The project begins as a solo presentation, on view September 13, 2024 - February 16, 2025, and shifts into the collective on February 28, 2025 when Graves for the Rain enters into a conversation with a range of sound-based projects in a museum-wide group exhibition. The project will incorporate a new layer of site responsive audio while continuing the ongoing processes-performances initiated at the start of the project.

Graves for the Rain is organized by Alexis Wilkinson, Curator.

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.