In Yakut folk tradition, the shaman acts as a mediator between this world and the next. In a yurt crowded with onlookers, the shaman communicates with spirits through an ecstatic ritual. In this installation and performance, artist Dunya Zakharova and composer Alina Petrova create an analogous space for their own ritual.

The artists perform from within an elaborately, excessively knotted and bulbous structure of stretched, stuffed, and sewn candy-colored wool and nylon that appears to organically envelope both wall and floor. Their clothing physically binds them to the installation to create a total, breathing body of soft folds and curves. It is a tactile, sacred and womb-like space that might offer refuge from a hyperconnected, globalized condition. It is one facet of Zakharova’s ongoing interest in hysteria and motherhood, and the ways in which bodies can be stretched between cultures and languages to the point of exhaustion and amnesia. How can one recover from accelerating globalization and hyphenated identities? Do we need forms of ritual, and states of ecstasy and transcendence?

The Yakut language is gradually disappearing; approximately 450,000 speakers remain in Sakha (a federal republic in Russia). In Algys – shamanic ceremonial poetry – Zakharova returns to her native language. She tells personal stories, myths, and lullabies, accompanied by a traditional shamanic tambourine and Petrova’s mixed field recordings and immersive low-frequency audio sequence. In gathering sounds and recordings, Petrova examined her feeling of overwhelming helplessness in the face of the sublimity of nature, which she describes as continually drawing her back into its soil. The artists respond to each other and their physical surroundings during the performance, their sounds amplified by the intimate space. The viewer is led into a state of trance, their body reverberating at 40 hz, in which they will interact with their perception of the process and surrounding bodies.

As the performance intensifies, Zakharova gradually abstracts and transcends language with vocalizations improvised according to emotion. In doing so, she recalls the “trans-rational” (Zaum) poetry of early Russian Futurists, who mined and recombined archaic Slavic and Turkic languages in the search for a universal, even mystical, language. A century later, Zakharova and Petrova also look both backwards and forwards, using indigenous tradition and subjective experience to enact a contemporary ritual.

For the artists, Algys is an attempt to rebuild an archaic picture of the world through language, sound, and an imagined mythology.

Olivia Crough