Dreamsong is thrilled to present our second solo exhibition with Brooklyn-based artist Tamar Ettun (b. 1982). REVOLVING features new and recent interdisciplinary work including Lilit's Aluminum Drawings (2025-2026), Purple Placenta (2024) - an interactive installation, IVF Documents (2025), a new soft sculpture as well as a series of works on paper.
Since 2020, Ettun’s multidisciplinary work Lilit the Empathic Demon has centered the eponymous aerial spirit demon with origins in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Judaic mythology. In the 2nd-7th centuries, artist-healers created spells, drawings, and talismanic objects to trap demons who were often named Lilit. Conceived in part as a rejoinder to taboos surrounding – and attacks on – reproductive health and freedoms, REVOLVING looks to ancient trauma-healing rituals to reflect on experiences of contemporary maternity.
IVF Documents (2025) (HD Video) depicts Ettun’s choreographed performance of an ancient Babylonian healing ritual in which artist-healers used incantation bowls to lead protective rituals for women concerned with their reproductive health. Undergirded by the artist’s research into these practices, IVF Documents poetically addresses experiences with assisted reproductive technology through live action and stop motion animation. Seeking a visual language for an experience our culture struggles to articulate, performers don artist-made masks, bloom flowers from their mouths, paint talismanic bowls with syringes and drain large bags of natural dye into an empty pool in Brooklyn.
Purple Placenta (2024), which debuted in New York at The Ford Foundation in their exhibition Cantando Bajito: Incantations, features a multilayered inflatable sculpture designed to resemble a placenta. Adapting the practices of ancient artist-healers, whose therapeutic rituals guided them through difficult situations, Ettun invited women to enter Purple Placenta, communicate with Lilit, and share stories of birth, abortion, infertility, and loss. The artist then wove these stories into an umbilical cord-like form which became part of the work. The installation emphasizes the value of conversation, especially within feminine circles, as well as the importance of spaces conducive to intimate connections, to being vulnerable, and to being heard. Purple Placenta holds these conversations to offer space for reflection and healing.
In 2025, Ettun began a new series of aluminum-carved drawings at Cornell University where she was the Teiger Mentor for their MFA students. The metal serves as the primary layer of a multi-dimensional assemblages which also feature hand-dyed and collaged textiles among other materials, emphasizing the visceral tension between the softness of the fiber and the cold permanence of the industrial aluminum. Nine works from this series will be presented for the first time.
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 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.
Ettun has received support from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, Interlude Artist Residency, Fountainhead, MOCA Tucson, Stoneleaf, MacDowell, Franklin Furnace, Iaspis, Art Production Fund, and RECESS. Ettun is the founder of The Moving Company, an artist collective that created performance art with sculpture in public spaces, and a social engagement project with Brooklyn teens hosted by The Brooklyn Museum. Ettun’s work is included in Phaidon’s anthology Great Women Sculptors (2024). Their most recent film IVF Documents was featured in the exhibition Designing Motherhood at MAD Museum (2025-2026). She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University.
