Ava Grauls
About
Ava Grauls is a South African/Belgian artist and performer based in London. Her practice is inspired by her experience of multiple migrations into new national norms and disappearing histories. Her current research considers the management of memories.
Grauls has exhibited in Hiroshima, London, Edinburgh, and Dundee. In 2019, she was awarded the Moira McGregor Bursary for a residency at Studio Kura in Japan. In 2021, she won the Royal Scottish Academy David Mitchie Travel Award. Her film "Obliterated" was selected for the Lisbon Art Weekend Programme in 2022. Grauls' painting was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2023, and she will be working with the Edge artist collective to host an exhibition in Hiroshima City in October, funded by the British Sasakawa Foundation.
She graduated from Duncan Jordanstone College of Art in 2021 in Dundee, before relocating to London to finish her masters at the RCA.
Statement
Grauls' work spans many traditional forms of making, such as painting, performance, video, songwriting, and publication. She is interested in exploring the relationships between memory, identity, and place. Her work is often playful and humorous, but it also deals with serious themes such as migration, colonialism, and the legacies of trauma.
For her RCA Graduate exhibition, Grauls juxtaposes her childhood memories with the hidden history of a British-owned asbestos mine in Swaziland (now Eswatini). Her uncanny feeling of trusting her memories but rarely finding evidence in the world became bewildering. These moments of social forgetfulness brought with them a new, strange nostalgia that had not dealt with past legacies of imperialism.
Her performance “Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” is presented inside a glass box, juxtaposed with the painting “SOUTH! Towards the Dark Continent,”. Her work seeks to present two retellings of history in the same space. Her experience of these “schizophrenic moments” is what she feels is a common way of seeing and thinking for the 'forever immigrant'.
Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Script
"The Empire loves our citizens!
Those at home …
and those at the farthest frontiers.
That serve most ardently
to hold the centre aloft,
above the degradation of savagery,
towards the administrations,
of these civilisations.
Building economies!
Building cities!
Building governments!
What we have thus far built
We have loved!"
Britannia
SOUTH! Towards the Dark Continent
Territory
Abstract paintings from maps of power.
Grauls uses land survey maps, geological maps, border maps and the silent, censored maps as the visual representation of how power moves through society and how the old story of invasion recycles itself into new causes.
Performance
Becoming a public nuisance
Ava Grauls began making songs and performances in Hiroshima, in 2011. Her videos have become absurd remarks on social norms, frustrations and exposing the subtext of the 'unsaid'.
Studio
