“Regard all dharmas as dreams”—Lojong: Buddhist Teachings on Compassion and Mind Training“Lord, have mercy on us!”—Litany of St Sebastian/Joan of Arc
Aviva Silverman’s sculpture and performance work anatomizes how objects, images and bodies become vessels for divine information, interlacing histories of art, religion and value Employing miniatures, votive dioramas, and nonhuman actors, it investigates technologies of spiritual and political surveillance They are interested in the protective intentions that ritual objects carry; the material histories of Abrahamic faiths infinitely repeating a lexicon of angels, iconography, prayer hands, rosaries Dislocated from familiar physical and temporal scales, these kitsch objects and mass-made icons hold their freightedness while fixing the ineffability of faith within their embodied materiality In highlighting the systems of interdependence often necessary to sustain vulnerable, marginalized communities, their sculptures consider alternative histories of individuals erased by the reductive monumentality of historic narrative, laying the groundwork for much of their activism Silverman has an ongoing engagement with oral history as a core collective member of the NEW YORK CITY TRANS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT, a community archive devoted to the preservation and sharing of trans histories Their labor across these disparate mediums is vested in the traditions of both folk art and paying reverence to the indigenous technology of oral history-keeping; the urge to do preservation work is drawn from Silverman’s diasporic Jewish lineage, to hold the transformative potentiality of sound, whether a single frequency or the spoken transmission of memory.