Anointment is a collaborative experimental performance work by the artists hooz and Cen Freedan O. The artists’ performers ground the room for the collective ritual through their articulation of meticulously choreographed movements, employing a refracted narrative through their bodies that begins with disjunction and culminates in transcendent nativity, set against an elegiac, choral-inspired sonic landscape.
Using the cast in this dynamic way ultimately conjures an energy of renewal, as movement is generated by modulating dualities, events across the temporal field, and navigating tumultuous currents of desire–the desire to protect, to change, to transcend base guilt feelings, to generate new life.
By enacting this ritual, the artists’ dynamic melding of archetypes and symbolism speaks to a boundary-obfuscating process of rebirth and renewal through repetition, trance, and communion with the divine. The divine here operates in the apophatic tradition, of an arrival at an internal consecration obtained through negation. But all acts of transfiguration involve a degree of sacrifice, even if they are outdated totemic paradigms that are no longer of service to our internal cosmologies.
The gallery space is essentially transformed into a vascular, otherworldly site necessary for our collective survival, as well as an arena for encoded, epigenetic messages–made manifest through the body–to be purged. At the heart of Anointment is the invocation of a devotional ancestry with the singular power to syncretize the whole spectrum of inner experience, while confronting the initiated to utilize the fullness of their observational power–to truly embody the act of ‘witnessing’. The proceedings recall an inversion of Bataille, who writes the following in the 1943 text, Inner Experience:
"The victim dies, thus the witnesses participate in an element which his death reveals. This element is what it is possible for us, along with religious historians, to call the sacred. The sacred is precisely the continuity of being revealed to those who fix their attention, in a solemn rite, on the death of a discontinuous being."
Even in moments of great upheaval, disruption, and tragedy, there is a deeper sense of unity and continuity that transcends individual existence. Witnessing, as in this case, can provide a glimpse into this profound interconnectedness and reveal glimpses of incorruptibility within all that is seemingly profane or tragic. So, in that sense, Anointment is an invitation to traverse the depths of consciousness and to participate in a rite of collective transformation.
Written By: Jasminne Morataya
Photos courtesy of Bibs Moreno, Murmmurs Gallery
