Venus Reincarnated at Public Functionary: New Variations on an Ancient Theme

 

Venus Reincarnated, curated by Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa, interrogates the fragmented, timeless image of Venus through the work of 22 artists affiliated with Public Functionary’s PF Studios residency program. Each artist offers their own reinterpretation of the theme, often through embodied re-examination of scant material traces buried in the past. Venus appears in the exhibit in the form of a primordial love goddess, but her name is likely also in reference to Dr. Rosa’s interest in critical fabulation in her past work. Critical fabulation, an approach coined by Saidiya Hartman in her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” allows the historian to address critical silences in the archive. In the essay, Hartman develops the critical fabulation framework as a means to engage fully with the archival traces of “Venus,” “an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world” (Hartman, 2008, p.1). Venus Reincarnated, then, is part of the ongoing conversation on critical fabulation as an artistic practice; the title envisions new lives for the goddess Venus as well as imagined futures for Venus, Hartman’s colonial subject.

The art historical spectre of Venus is prevalent throughout the exhibition. In their stop-motion video Venus in the Mirror, Luca Isa Trujillo gestures toward the historical image of the classical goddess, often depicted in European paintings gazing at herself in a mirror. In the video, Venus’s face emerges on a textile clamshell, referencing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; nose, eyes, lips, and ears come first, signalling the primacy of the senses in Trujillo’s interpretation. This is a Venus who tastes and smells; the nude, static Venus who can only exercise sensory agency by gazing at her own reflection is not here. Each body part quivers and moves, eventually organizing into a cohesive whole. Trujillo depicts a Venus who moves, plays, and morphs; she is activated for contemporary eyes and anything but passively vain.

 

Charbagh of VENUS | 'impressed', 2025. Gallery view.

 

Asha Rowland’s contribution, Charbagh of VENUS | ‘Impressed,’ also uses video to explore Venus, though the effect is entirely different. A video of the artist is projected onto a nighttime tableau of the sea framed by Roman columns and garnished with water lilies. Given the title, we can deduce that the scene takes place in a charbagh or quadrilateral garden separated by the four waterways of Paradise as outlined in the Quran. Rowland’s movement integrates seamlessly with the acrylic/paper/wax/canvas backdrop. Rowland is professionally trained in Bharatanatyam, Raqs Sharqi, and experimental dance, and aspects of each discipline are woven through the phrase.

This has the uncanny impact of placing Rowland’s dance outside of linear space and time. The setting and subject combine Greco-Roman mythology with antique Islamic aesthetics, again creating a hybrid mythos which answers to no one particular religious tradition. The specificity of Rowland’s finger movements as she plucks invisible flowers from the ground, combined with the visible projector and the silence of the film, recall a pantomime or silent film. Rowland’s decision to project the dance onto a still background implies that the dance itself is disembodied from its context; it may be transferred elsewhere, like the Greek concept of metempsychosis, a transference of the soul roughly parallel with reincarnation which presumes that the body and spirit can be fully decoupled. 

 

Grover Hogan, The Empress, 2025. Gallery view.

 

Grover Hogan’s The Empress also makes use of projection. Harkening back to analogue technology, an overhead projector is placed on a church chair and overlaid by a birdcage. Hogan invites tactile interaction with the materials, having assembled a selection of slides and transparencies ready for play. The viewer is empowered to become the creator; the work changes based on who is currently looking at it. While Venus remains the subject of the piece, Hogan offers the viewer total control of Venus’s image, position, and very materiality.

Mohamed Abdalla’s piece Spirit interrogates the materiality of Venus further through a disarticulated goddess figure mounted in pieces on the far wall of the gallery. She is adorned with real human hair, shells, metal jewelry, leather fringe, and a leather bag. A bag artisan and a sculptor who also runs the sustainable brand LZRWORLD, Abdalla’s armless sculpture posed in profile conjures a new Venus de Milo as well as the historic photographs of Sarah Baartman, the “Venus Hottentot” who was exhibited at freakshows in the 19th century and whose objectified image was used to validate racist medical typologies after her death. In Abdalla’s sculpture, Venus is the carrier of luxury, not the exploited laborer. 

The artists featured play freely, often acknowledging that in many cases she has been grafted onto older representations of female beauty and fertility such as palaeolithic “Venus” figurines and love/sex goddesses in pantheons across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It isn’t just subject matter that communicates the “global Venus:” the art materials themselves often reference place and origin stories, such as Thea Lauren Pineda’s piece Saing, ink on jasmine rice on handmade banana leaf paper.

 

 

A strength of the show is that the works on display are always in conversation with each other. Hogan’s overhead projector piece is cleverly placed next to a video by Genie Hien Tran. While Hogan’s piece is a slow, improvised medley, Tran’s is a wild mixed media collage; both are formal inquiries into montage. Abdalla’s wall sculpture hangs next to Ashley Koudou’s The Body Remembers, a print featuring a disembodied midsection adorned with red beaded wire, another possible stylistic reference to the Venus de Milo. Clearly, Venus Reincarnated represents not just the meditations of disparate artists on a theme but the process-based responses of an intertwined artist community.◼︎ 

 

Venus Reincarnated is on view through December 6th. Join the conversation with Dr. Margarita Lila Rosa, the curator of Venus Reincarnated, at Public Functionary with co-moderators Essence Enwere, Bakibakibaki Porter, and Grover Hogan, this Thursday, November 6th at 7pm.