Dreamsong is pleased to participate in NADA Villa Warsaw. Our presentation features three female artists whose enigmatic paintings and sculptures draw from myth, prehistory and the occult. Through sustained visual and archival research, the artistic practices of Tamar Ettun (b. 1982, Jerusalem), Kristen Sanders (b. 1989, California) and Maria Kozak (b. 1982, Krakow) unearth and amplify the mysterious, mythic and spiritual links that bind us to each other and our ancestries.
Tamar Ettun’s research of ancient incantation bowls used for protective rituals in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Judaic mythology has evolved into a comprehensive practice encompassing video, drawing, performance and sculpture. Artist-healers would trap demons like Lilit, who was characterized as a dangerously sexual female entity.Ettun’s project reimagines these talismanic objects through a contemporary feminist lens, subverting Lilit’s misogynistic archetype and revamping her image as an Empathic Demon. The artist’s Demon Traps, glazed and unglazed stoneware sculptures, frequently assume avian forms that recall Lilit’s mythological association with raptors and owls and are often adorned with shibori dyeing wands.
The recurring subject-matters of Kristen Sanders’ paintings – ancient mark-making, flint stone tools, skulls, seashells, medical mannequins – address the historical evolution and mysterious origins of our uniquely human consciousness. By layering her paintings with references to our primordial past, Sanders raises questions about the ongoing development of human consciousness in an increasingly technological future. Often isolated on windswept beaches, the figures in her portraits – such as the mannequin in Blood Star (2025) – straddle an uncanny line between self-aware and inanimate.
Like Sanders, Maria Kozak’s paintings allude to an underlying circularity coursing through human existence. A self-described descendant of “dowsers, alchemists, and Polish mystics,” Kozak’s fluid, moody paintings chart the cyclical, irresolvable interactions that emerge from the classic dichotomies of the human condition. Taking cues from German Expressionism, the social milieu of Kozak’s world fluctuates between the sacred and profane, with carnivalesque abandon and sinister intention coursing atop the confusion of an uncertain world. Taken together, Ettun, Sanders and Kozak offer a glimpse beyond the quotidian demands of daily life, hinting at ancient motivations, desires, and pathways that hover at the margins of recognition.
