REVOLVINGby Tamar Ettun

In REVOLVING, Tamar Ettun’s second solo presentation with Dreamsong, the Brooklyn-based artist (b. 1982) explores contemporary experiences with maternity and reproductive health care through the lens of ancient Babylonian ritual practices. Linking shared subject matter across a breadth of media, the exhibition includes video work (IVF Documents, 2025), an interactive installation (Purple Placenta, 2024), laser-cut aluminum collages (Lilit’s Aluminum Drawings, 2025-26), a new soft sculpture and a series of works on paper. Referencing the visual language and related ritual practices of ancient Aramaic incantation bowls from late-antique Mesopotamia—earthenware vessels designed to trap and exorcise demons—Ettun’s ongoing multidisciplinary project Lilit the Empathic Demon (2020-present) is grounded in the artist’s personal experience and extensive research.

Since 2020, Ettun’s practice has centered the aerial spirit demon Lilit who was historically associated with threats to fertility and reproductive health. In 4th – 7th century CE Mesopotamia, incantation bowls inscribed with spiral texts written in Aramaic and related dialects alongside images drawn by artist-healers were buried beneath homes in order to trap Lilit and demand her expulsion from the household. Adapting this ritual for the film IVF Documents, Ettun choreographed a performance in which participants, each one undergoing IVF themselves or otherwise in postmenopause, don artist-made ceramic masks, bloom flowers from their mouths, paint talismanic bowls with syringes and drain large bags of dye into an empty public swimming pool in Brooklyn. Derived from the artist’s research into fertility treatments, IVF Documents poetically deploys both live action and stop-motion animation to address experiences with assisted reproductive technology.

Purple Placenta, which debuted in New York at the Ford Foundation’s exhibition Cantando Bajito: Incantations, features a large-scale inflatable installation designed to resemble a placenta with an umbilical cord. Like IVF Documents, Purple Placenta looks to ancient protective practices in order to provide space for addressing contemporary traumas. Prior to its first public presentation, Ettun invited women to enter the work, communicate with Lilit and share stories about birth, abortion, infertility and loss. The artist then wove many of these stories into an umbilical cord-like form that subsequently became part of Purple Placenta. Emphasizing the value of communication and shared experience, especially within feminine circles, Purple Placenta continues to provide a forum for reflection and healing upon each subsequent presentation.

In her role as the Teiger Mentor for MFA students at Cornell University, Ettun materially expanded her drawing practice, developing a set of laser-cut aluminum panels adorned with hand-dyed and collaged textiles. Depicting the artist’s ever-expanding roster of demons, these works emphasize the visceral tension between the softness of fabrics and the cold permanence of industrial aluminum. Arranged in a large grid in the gallery, Lilit’s Aluminum Drawings are accompanied by new series of five works on paper. Drawn with handmade pastels and embellished with sewn elements, these whimsical demons possess a childlike naiveté, a playful joie-de-vivre that contrasts with the heavy complexity of Ettun’s subject-matter.

By layering personal experience with extensive research conducted through the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Ettun has developed a cohesive visual vocabulary and conceptually rigorous project across multiple disciplines. Importantly, the artist asks us not only to contemplate maternal and reproductive health so that we might acknowledge its complexity, but through participatory engagement, to contribute our own stories in the construction of her artworks. This reciprocal focus on healing, storytelling across time and ritual performance is at the core of Ettun’s practice.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tamar Ettun (she/they) is a 2025-2026 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden where she is researching how female artists have engaged with themes of pregnancy, birth and motherhood. Ettun’s research-based and community-engaged work has been presented at the Museum of Art and Design, The Ford Foundation, The Walker Art Center, Pioneer Works, The Chinati Foundation, The Watermill Center, Art Omi Sculpture Garden, PERFORMA, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Jewish Museum, and Sculpture Center. They have received support from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, Interlude Artist Residency, Fountainhead, MOCA Tucson, Stoneleaf, MacDowell, Franklin Furnace, Iaspis, Art Production Fund, and RECESS. Ettun’s work is included in Phaidon’s anthology Great Women Sculptors (2024). Her most recent film IVF Documents was featured in the exhibition Designing Motherhood at MAD Museum (2025-2026) and in What’s in a Story?, a video program curated by Barbara London and presented by CYFEST 17, a collateral event of the 61st Venice Biennale (May 2026). Ettun holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University.