South African born, Miami-based Anja Marais combines photography, sculpture, and collage to explore the plight of the disenfranchised throughout history. She is part of a generation of post-apartheid artists, one whose work deals with the plight of immigrants, nomads, pioneers, pilgrims, and refugees throughout history. She also assays African and ancient mythology, as well as Shaman mysticism. Her artist statement begins with a quote: “The conquered and exiles take their earth with them, carry with them their rituals as codes of continuity in the new world.…but find themselves in paradoxical waters that both show up their presence and render them invisible” – Ben Okri
Anja’s two and three-dimensional works mix archaic materials and found objects with alternative process photographs. She uses rust, wood, molded fabrics, and earth to reference her “interest in the ritual. They are reminders of ancestors moving across the uncharted sea, steppe, ice, desert, and forest."
Anja explains: "I create in a wide range of disciplines and materials. My work establishes the relationship between landscape and the displaced. Challenging the man-made borders of geography and culture. The leitmotiv of history fuels my work. The unwritten cyclical lineage of the ancestral and the ecological. The only constant in the unfurling of humanity as nomads is the one witness, the earth. When immigrants, nomads, pioneers, pilgrims, and refugees trekked through the milieu of wilderness, they left their rituals, ceremonies, and stories behind in the soil.
Hannah Arendt said that ‘events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine processes and routine procedures’.
There are some events that happen in life that cause a people to cross a threshold that forever changes them, whether they seek transformation or not. I focus on the imprints in landscapes with a sense of proximity to history and ancestors, that carry a mixture of impermanence and permanence and a blend of truth and myth. This process in return offers a means to rebuild collective memory.
Marais apprenticed at a young age with a well-known regional landscape painter until she left to study art in Pretoria. After graduating with a B.F.A, Honours from the University of South Africa, she emigrated to the United States. Her work has since been included in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Marais has held residencies in Japan, the Mino Art Residency; the Seoul Art Space Geumcheon Residency in Korea; Kronstadt Art Residency in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Arteles Art Residency, Finland, and in the States the Ucross art residency, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sedona Summer Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
She has been selected and participated in various, esteemed programs such as the Enrique Martinez Celaya Summer Workshop (in affiliation with the Anderson Ranch Art Center). She is also the recipient of the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship 2014, Florida Division of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Fellowship 2010, the Anne Mckee Grant 2011 & 2013 and won the People’s Choice Award from Sculpture Key West curated by Shamim M Momin in 2009. She participated in collaborations that were awarded the MOCA Miami Optic Nerve 2012’s best short and selected for the Short Corner Film Festival at Cannes. Her work is included in numerous private collections and Museum collections like MOCA (Miami), Kronstadt History Museum (Russia), Akari Museum (Japan). She currently works and lives in Miami.
