Harpo Foundation Grant Recipient 2020

I am a recipient of a Harpo Foundation Grant, to support my ongoing project inspired by South African activist Steve Biko. Biko’s work hallmarked a movement of integrating that which we have fragmented. Not merely ceasing the behaviors of repression, but liberating ourselves from the intent of tearing society apart. His writings are a roadmap to intersectionality and attentiveness to the world. I am very grateful to Harpo Foundation for supporting my work.

You can read more at : http://www.harpofoundation.org/anja-marais-grants-for-visual-artists/

By Anja Marais|2022-05-30T13:27:14-04:00December 15th, 2020|

The Ellies Creator awardee 2020

This past year, I completed two East to West cross-country journeys through the United States, I drove a total 12,528 miles which equal 50% around the world. In the last steps of my personal odyssey, I received a phone call from Oolite Arts – they granted me an Ellies Creative Award. This precious gift of funding symbolized new beginnings for me. The birth of a project, the next chapter in my art journey. Thank you Oolite Arts for believing in my work. Congratulations to my fellow winners as well! Check them out at www.theEllies.org.

I am looking forward to share the process of my project called HOW TO SLEEP THROUGH FALLING SILENCES on my website and Instagram. This project is a multi-sensory lucid dreaming installation with audio from the testament of anti-apartheid freedom fighter, Steve Biko (1946 – 1977). This interactive installation aspires to break the re-occurrence of white supremacy and awaken the participant from trans-generational conditioning of deafness towards the ‘other’.

“So as a prelude whites must be made to realise
that they are only human, not superior.
Same with Blacks. They must be made to realise.
that they are also human, not inferior.”
– Steve Biko

This year the award ceremony was virtual due to COVID:

By Anja Marais|2022-05-30T13:40:32-04:00October 22nd, 2020|

Inter | Sectionality at Corcoran [ Group Exhibition]

Inter | Sectionality Corcoran – Anja Marais

Inter | Sectionality at Corcoran : Diaspora Art from the Creole City

My work was selected as one of the 25 artists that are representing Miami to exhibit in Washington DC from next month. My sculpture series Once Upon a Time, When We Exhaled The Sky will be on display. This is a series of seven found object cairns treated with ceremonial lime. If you are in the DC area stop by in the next four months to view the exhibition.

Inter | Sectionality is a bold, multiregional, multidisciplinary exhibition, curatorial collaboration, and exploration of the emergence of the “Creole City” as a local, regional and global phenomenon. Internationally recognized curators Sanjit Sethi, former director of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, and Rosie Gordon-Wallace, founder, president and curator of DVCAI (Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator) have designed this collaboration to provide a lens through which communities and community leaders internationally can begin to better understand themselves, their diversities and their unlimited possibilities.

Highlighting the work of 25 Miami-affiliated visual artists, along with two guest artists, the exhibit is grouped around themes that encompass diaspora and Creole City life stories, memory, politics, myth, religion, and culture. Special performances and programs will be presented throughout the run, which will be from Nov. 14, 2019, through March 20, 2020.

Inter | Sectionality will be presented in our nation’s capital at a time when diaspora artists and voices are challenging social justice, celebrating identities, and reactivating and bridging communities through contemporary art and scholarship. The complexities and diversities represented by this exhibit are emergent and, in many cases, ascendant across the world.

The exhibition is free and on view Nov. 14, 2019 – Mar. 20, 2020; Tuesday – Friday 10 a.m. – 6 p.m. and weekends from 1 – 6 p.m

[ rsvp ]

Inter | Sectionality Corcoran – Diaspora art from the Creole City

By Anja Marais|2019-10-25T08:32:55-04:00October 25th, 2019|

Florida Prize 2019 [Write-ups]

Orlando Sentinel

By Trevor Fraser

“I love the cultural diversity of languages and histories of Floridians speaking Spanish, French, Dutch, and Creole, as well as Indigenous and African dialects. The pastiche of faces, stories, and cultures is a living collage that I base my own studio collages on. My intent for the Florida Prize Exhibition is working at the interstices of categories, where photography merges with sculpture or sculpture with installation. Exploring niches that feel both traditional and contemporary. My sculptures, depend upon found materials. I do not see these objects as a representation of “waste” but that of “possibilities,” Where the discarded, the broken, the unwanted can metamorphosize and regain dignity” – Anja Marais

[READ MORE]

Orlando Weekly

By Richard Reep and Jessica Bryce Young

…Next we come to Anja Marais. Her area narrows the view to black and white, a deliberate reference to her identity as a white African. Her installation channels piles of white-washed found objects into totems of self and family. Where Kobašlija showed junk misplaced in Florida’s nature, Marais elevates it into sacred cairns. Marais’ beautifully detailed work has a raw, earthy energy…

[READ MORE]

By Anja Marais|2019-06-25T20:55:56-04:00June 25th, 2019|

Florida Prize

By Anja Marais|2019-06-25T21:16:43-04:00May 25th, 2019|