A Cooperative Enterprise pavilion Part 2

This work considers the collective experience of rocks, insects, and animals in our environment and their equal participation in art creation and knowledge building. 

Fata Morgana is a mirage, seen from the perspective of a rock in Cappadocia, Turkey. The rock as a witness to the movement of an insect questions its own memories confusing present, past, and future, it is in a dream space.

​The hills remember and the sand speaks, they are always listening. Centuries of sound and light are captured within the rocks, if only we could unleash their memories. Fata Morgana predicts an archaeology of sound, a future of possibilities in unlocking the histories recorded within the rocks and the caves in Cappadocia. Artist Anne Murray projects sounds and images, recorded conversations and abstracted light videos, as well as environmental sounds and poetry across rocks and within caves in the Cappadocia region of Turkey. These private conversations, secret moments will be forever locked into the rocks, leaving a lasting impression, which one day, with new technology, might be seen and heard again by future generations.
These conversations and projections explore the secret and overt instances of the invention of language through sound experiments, with our bodies as instruments and with light and objects as external means of communication. With caves and hills that date back millennia, the sound captured within them could include everything from animal to human, even electronic noise; the artist explores this notion of sounds in a landscape and the possibilities of invention and impression, what one can conjure from the history of a space and leave as impression, which the rocks could witness for future generations to mine.

Anne Murray is an artist, writer, and curator. Her work explores human and other, language and absence, identifying new pathways to connect, while imagining herself as both an octopus and a stone. This research manifests in various media including poetry, video, installation, performance, photography, social practice, and art criticism. Educated with a BFA from Parsons School of Design in Paris, MFA and MS in Art History from Pratt Institute in New York, and M.Ed. from The College of New Jersey Global Studies Program, Mallorca, she now lives in Budapest. Her video work Exquisite Exodus was included in Cf as part of the Research Pavilion curated by Jeanette Doyle at the Venice Biennale in 2017 and at La Biennale Méditerranéenne d’Art Contemporain d’Oran, Algeria. She has exhibited in Europe, Asia, and the United States.
www.annemurrayartist.com

Silence Drew Off: Women’s Work, My Museum Studio

“Throughout the history of art, decoration and domestic handicrafts have been regarded as women’s work, and as such, not considered ‘high’ or fine art. Quilting, embroidery, needlework, china painting, and sewing—none of these have been deemed worthy artistic equivalents to the grand mediums of painting and sculpture. The age-old aesthetic hierarchy that privileges certain forms of art over others based on gender associations has historically devalued ‘women’s work’ specifically because it was associated with the domestic and the ‘feminine.’” — Women’s Work, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center For Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/womens_

Working, embroidering, in major museums. Theses spaces become my studio and  my public performance space. A new relationship is created between the art that is owned and displayed and a space for my physical work and creation—my intervention and public performance. My new studio, the museum, is filled with the work of other artists, mostly men’s. Men’s paintings and sculptures many times of women. They’re the canon. All this is now juxtaposed

Using used material—old napkins, handkerchiefs, and a dish towel—and the found text from letters and other material from my grandmother’s scrapbook 1905-07. (She died when my father was 9.) These objects contained memories. Deconstructed and reconstructed. Fragments of stories. Changing the text and images beyond the original personal ephemera with fabric, thread, and needle.  


Selected Interventions—May I Have Your Autograph, Basel Art Fair Miami

Critical Conversations in a Limo (The Armory Fair-Piers, NYC), (International Arts Festival) Melbourne, Australia) and UCSC & The Lab, San Francisco 


Document my performance and work by making a series of very short selfie videos.


Holly Crawford, 2021

This is a part of my video project «The Day The Sun Stands Still”

My dear sun 
Rest in peace 
Until I wake you up 
For now all is done 
Take a rest please 
And sleep calm

Why.
Over the last year I have experienced a row of different meetings with death. My father whose stubbornness and obsession with film photography I inherited, died. My grandmother who raised me and whose patience I absorbed from my childhood, died. My personal relationship in which I found my true self once, became a trap for me, and died. My vision of life, myself and the future turned out to be ruined.
I needed a personal ritual to make myself deeply sleep over from everything that happened. Some fairytales say that «The morning is wiser than the evening», means that certain work should be done internally.
Thus I went out to put myself to sleep.

Where.
I went to a steppe (I am from steppe region actually but I couldn’t visit exactly there to my hometown Donetsk because it is occupied by Russian terrorists since 2014) which bears a special, fragile and silent, beauty.
The exact place I went to make a ritual is called “Kamyana Mohyla”, “The Stone Tomb”. Although nobody is buried there, people have been making their rituals and sacred ceremonies there since the late Paleolithic times. And so did I.

When.
The video was filmed on a special day: winter solstice, the day when the sun stands still, significant death and rebirth of the Sun according to ancient mythology.
So basically, this piece is a document of personal mythology. In this project I was reflecting on symbolic, psychological inner death that aligned with the annual state of winter hibernation. I was appealing to mythological ancient practice and cyclicality of nature, conducting a ritual of preparing myself for winter hibernation among the stones in the native steppe.
In other words, it is a performative ritual that I arranged as a “seasonal “funeral” in order to honor the cyclicity of life.

The project Collectivity as an Active Step of Art
Curator: Emireth Herrera Valdés Photographer: Gunnar H. Tufta

Contemporary transformations in social structures have emerged from phenomena such as immigration and economic precarity. As a result, there has been a positive effect on the diversity of creative practices in city life. Today the power of collectivity has again become an act of resilience. The projects From the Vulnerable Territory to the Utopia and Collectivity as an Active Step of Art aim to present the results of my empirical research project focused on creativity as an act of resilience. It is possible to observe the material culture in those “invisible” territories whose collective creations present vastly different narratives of the world than those typically found in a museum or gallery. Along with photographer Gunnar H. Tufta, we explored the peripheral area of Saltillo, a city in Northern Mexico. The purpose was to find creativity, identity, and a versatile urban space created by the local communities and immigrants that are often waiting for the train to cross the border with the United States.

The curatorial project includes a photograph series that shows how vulnerable territories in Northern Mexico--their activities, behavior, and daily life--become the inspiration and motivation to produce art.

*Workshop
I organized the workshop From the Vulnerable Territory to the Utopia as part of the project The project Collectivity as an Active Step of Art. This workshop involves using strategies that invite spectators to reflect and establish a critical posture and dialogue, dream, and imagine a different world through collective work as an act of resilience.

The workshop was offered during summer 2019 at AROS Museum in Aarhus, Denmark, and in Walther Plaths, a community center for homeless Danes. During the workshop, participants were invited to imagine a utopian city and reflect on how they would contribute positively to such a community. While talking about past experiences and imagining their dream city, participants draw and color a map symbolizing essential elements and acts that makes us all human beyond ethnic, cultural, economic, physical and emotional borders.

Art Within All: Healing & Art

My focus on social purposes led me to create the virtual gallery Art Within All to create a safe, creative, and healing space where artists are invited to share their art around relevant social topics.
The online exhibition Holding Paradise spotlights 22 photographs by Gunnar H. Tufta illuminates a life-threading illness and its transformation into a more aggressive form of cancer. The exhibition shows the transition of his life between fighting the illness, researching treatments, and more importantly, his “focus on preserving the beauty in life gets magnified.” (GHT, 2019). 

Holding Paradise evokes processes and questions our resilience while dealing with our surroundings in difficult times. Each tropical flower reminds us of the importance of cherishing moments and the people around us.

Installation, video projection of face on sphere before painting of hand with hole.

Horse tooth balancing on water filled bag.

Stop motion film made of one painting painted on two sides on transparent material. Every brush stroke is filmed on both sides and takes one second. Video length 60 seconds. No back ground.

Stop motion film made of one painting painted on two sides on transparent material. Every brush stroke is filmed on both sides and takes one second. Video length 60 seconds. Transparency of the carrying material shows back ground garden.

Water filled bag on beat.