FLUX PROJECTS PRESENTS “Our mothers, our water, our peace”
Flux Projects presents Our mothers, our water, our peace, Gyun Hur’s participatory installation exploring grief and healing in our Asian communities. Hur's practice is deeply informed by her experience growing up in Georgia as an immigrant and reflects on the intersectional traumas, resilience, and love of immigrant communities of color. In collaboration with Nicole Kang Ahn, artist and community liaison for the project, and various Atlanta Asian community organizations, Hur explores how the Atlanta Spa Shootings in March 2021, followed by the escalation of hate crimes, instilled irreversible change in the narratives the next generation of Asian Americans will share with their children.
Hur begins Our mothers, our water, our peace by inviting Atlanta’s Asian communities into the project and asking for their participation. She will install a constellation of hand-blown glass vessels in various sizes, which allude to the form of raindrops or tears, amongst the Atlanta Asian communities in both public and private spaces curated by Hur for their role in caring for these communities. The vessels will hold local creek and river water and seed conversations around intergenerational work, healing, and community engagement through a series of workshops and gatherings. The first set of glass vessels are installed in the offices of the Asian American Advocacy Fund and Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Atlanta.
Hur sees the river’s constant movement as a choreography of “letting go” while generating life. In her childhood memories from South Korea, rivers were sites of mourning, washing, and rejoicing. In the larger context, rivers hold ecological memories of abundance, eradication, borders, and power.
“I am trying to listen to my intergenerational and ancestral griefs and their asks. Hours of preparatory conversations, writing, tears, and site visits have been an essential part of this project that feel like a remedy to my experience as an Asian American who grew up in the American South and has been living with historical and ongoing impacts of domination,” said Hur.
Through Our mothers, our water, our peace, Hur seeks to hold space for Atlanta’s Asian communities and beyond, asking questions such as: How have we arrived here? What is that we are feeling - the weight, the ache? What are the ways for us to heal? How do I hold you? What song do we sing? How do we choose to remember our griefs and loves on this land? How do we convert legacies of violence into a poetic citation of agency?
“I am asking to be a part of something greater than myself in this work, asking to return to a community that has transformed beyond my memories of it and yet still remains familiar,” explains Hur.
In 2025, Hur will gather these glass vessels to create a large-scale installation that will open to the public in March, the fourth anniversary of the Atlanta Spa Shootings. The installation will be a site of remembrance, lamentation, and celebration; and Hur will invite local Asian American artists to activate the site in conjunction with the work.
Through Our mothers, our water, our peace, Hur seeks to situate the Atlanta Spa Shootings within Atlanta’s historical landscape of trauma; and with other works to follow, she aims to historize this tragedy into American memory.
“In 2011, Flux Projects first presented a work by Gyun Hur, Spring Hiatus in Lenox Square mall. A project exploring her familial past and ties to Korea, her experience as an immigrant was already deeply influencing her work,” said Anne Archer Dennington, executive director of Flux Projects. “We are honored to work with her again on Our mothers, our waters, our peace, a project that illuminates and expands the conversation around sociocultural issues facing Atlantans today.”
With Our mothers, our water, our peace, Flux Projects continues FLOW, a multi-year series designed to explore Atlanta’s relationship with water, how it has shaped our city and the potential it holds for our future. With projects like this, Ghost Pools and Atlanta River Time, FLOW will engage issues of conservation, equity, and urban design through installations and performances. Projects will be installed along creeks and watersheds, over buried waterways, and at other sites reconnecting us with nature and each other.
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About Gyun Hur:
Hur is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and an educator whose biographical context as a first generation immigrant largely informs her creative practice and pedagogical approach. Born in South Korea, she moved to Atlanta, at the age of 13 and studied painting and sculpture at the University of Georgia and Savannah College of Art and Design. In Hur’s practice, she is deeply engaged in generating poetics of beauty and grief in visual and emotional spaces she creates. Through iterations of installations, performances, drawings, and writings, Hur traverses between autobiographical abstraction and figurative storytelling, asking what holds us together; stories, yearnings, rituals and spirituality. Our mothers, our water, our peace is her second project with Flux Projects after Spring Hiatus about a decade ago. In both works, Hur invites the audience to participate in this labor of unraveling our layered, perplexing stories with grace and time.
About Flux Projects:
Flux Projects commissions public art that invites audiences in Atlanta to explore the city’s sites and stories as a means to imagining its future possibilities. These projects disrupt the everyday and inspire imagination, wonder, and awe. They support artists to take risks and grow their practices whether they are internationally acclaimed or producing their first public work. They create communal spaces for people of all walks of life. And they bring a location’s past, present and future into conversation in ways that open our eyes to new possibilities. Flux Projects gives art the space to transform