MUDAR
Mudar emerged from Anna Franke’s recent residency at AADK Murcia in southern Spain. Developed through performance, sculpture, macro-filming, and fieldwork in the salt mines, the project extends her ongoing investigation into how bodies register landscape, memory, and states of transformation.
Down the Rabbit Hole follows Franke as she turns to the writings of Ibn ʿArabī, particularly the idea of Barzakh—the threshold space between worlds, between matter and its echo, between what has been and what might become. In Mudar, the skin operates as both boundary and passage: a literal surface and a conceptual border where dissolution, renewal, and contact take place.
Working with salt, light, water, sound, and touch, Franke approaches the site as a living material archive. The project moves between presence and disappearance, between the physical body and its digital double, and between sculptural form and performance. What unfolds is not a single object but a process: an unfolding experiment shaped by environment, movement, and elemental force.
Through this pavilion, we encounter Mudar as research, as ritual, and as an evolving practice that operates at the edge of the visible.
"This work is an immersive performance and a sculpture in motion of a shedding in a salt mine in southern Spain. It's a search for renewal through touch, salt, water, sound, and sunlight.
In the upcoming months I will explore this dialogues that reflect between corporal presence and its digital echo. I will experiment with the aesthetics of macrofilming, sound, language and performance with a sculpture that I created during an immersive residency programme at AADK in Murcia.
The project is inspired by the Sufi mystique Ibn Arabi, especially the idea of Barzakh: the space between worlds, between the real and the imagined, between what was and what might become. It’s an exploration of presence, absence, and memory, of listening, of my body in movement.
You are invited to a microcosmic, slow drive, where light and matter dissolve, where the skin is a barrier and at the same time a connection to the cosmos."
– Anna Franke
Process documentation from the development of Mudar during Anna Franke’s residency at AADK Murcia. These images trace the fieldwork, material tests, and performance-based gestures that shaped the work.
