South African multi-disciplinary artist Anja Marais is from a generation of post-apartheid artists whose work deals with the plight of the disenfranchised. Along with exploring history, she also assays African and ancient mythology, and later, Shaman mysticism. Anja explains: "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." Her two and three-dimensional works mix archaic materials and found objects with alternative process photographs, using rust, wood, molder fabrics, and earth to reference her interest in the ritual. “A reminder of ancestors moving across the uncharted sea, steppe, ice, desert, and forest."
Marais apprenticed 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. She has held residencies in Japan, Korea, St. Petersburg, Russia, Finland, and in various places in the United States. She is a 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 the People’s Choice Award from Sculpture Key West, curated by Shamim M Momin in 2009. Her work is included in numerous private collections and Museum collections like MOCA (Miami), Kronstadt History Museum (Russia), and Akari Museum (Japan). She works and lives in Miami.
ANJA MARAIS' WEB SITE
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