Feather, Part II

PERFORMANCE AT YV ART MUSEUM, JULY 27TH, 2024

On July 27, 2024, I enacted a cremation ritual for the mummy featured in the feather installation. This was not a pre-planned performance, rather a natural evolution of the work: a mysterious mold had bloomed across the mummy, and a stroke of bad luck (illnesses, broken appliances) had fallen upon the museum. I’m not quite comfortable calling what we were experiencing a curse, but it certainly felt like one. Curses and tombs. I’d hardly be the first.

Carrying the figure from the gallery to the museum’s beach, I placed her at the center of a linen cloth laid in a circular form upon the sand. The fire was lit from within the sculpture, her inner circuitry becoming the first to ignite. As the flames rose, I recited Spell 81A: “For Being Transformed into a Lotus” from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, an incantation believed to guide the soul’s metamorphosis into a lotus flower. Moving in slow procession around the burning figure, I carried a jar of incense, allowing the smoke to mingle with the air on the water. When the fire subsided, I gathered the ashes and fragments of charred material, returning them to the mummy’s original resting place within the gallery—completing the cycle of offering, destruction, and rebirth.