Trickster Magazine

Zody is set to open her first solo exhibition in Estonia at the Hobusepea Gallery. We asked her to share some insights about the upcoming show.

Every nine years nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from evil. I hear their steps or their voices in the depths of the stone galleries and I run joyfully to find them. The ceremony lasts a few minutes. They fall one after another without my having to bloody my hands. They remain where they fell and their bodies help distinguish one gallery from another. I do not know who they are, but I know that one of them prophesied, at the moment of his death, that some day my redeemer would come. Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries, fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?

- The House of Asterion, Jorge Luis Borges, 1964. (From Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings)

Zody: My first Estonian solo exhibition borrows its title from Jorge Luis Borges' short story of the same name. I've adopted its structural framework—where the identity of the narrator is only revealed at the climax—as a guiding principle for my work. Expanding on Borges’ engagement with archetypes and labyrinthine narratives, I weave together sculptural reliefs, illustrations, architectural and linguistic fragments, and shifting spatial compositions to explore the collapse of linear time and the suffocating influence of inherited narratives. Through this recontextualization, the exhibition reflects on the disorienting effects of life under late capitalism—where indulgence carries inverted global consequences, individual agency is made vague within structures designed to obscure, and inherited cultural-mythic archetypes, like vestiges of fallen empires, quietly persist in the everyday.

The exhibition is accompanied by two short stories I have written that build off of Borges’ narrative.

The House of Asterion

Pasiphae, the King’s blond grail, lived in a world of soft abundance. Oils, fats and silks were her dowry, her feather bed her impregnable fortress. With an insouciance that enraptured Minos, she wound him around her finger, ensnaring him in her material desires as if within Ariadne’s web—his own will softened, sublimated, dissolved like a housefly, silk-bound and liquefied. Magnificent in her excess, empowered in her indulgence, she had never known the spindly cloying fingers of hunger until she saw the bull.

Desire makes a door where none should be. Desire makes a hollow space and says: enter.

The bull was beautiful. So a structure was built, a form that was also an opening, a mouth that swallowed her whole. Inside, Pasiphaë was weightless, beyond pleasure, beyond shame, lost in the spiraling whorl of her own wanting. Outside the world continued without her. The banquet halls filled and emptied, and beneath her ribs, something began to turn, like the slow grinding of stone against stone.

What came next was simply cause and effect. A door opened, something passed through, and Asterion came screaming into the world. And Pasiphaë, who had always gotten what she wanted, turned away. She did not look back.

Asterion did not know the blue steelplate face of the sky. He could not envision the folding rivers of his country. But he knew the house as the body of a beast knows its own breath—he could feel its slow pulse in the stones beneath his feet, its tender sigh in the drafts that slid like fingers across his skin, like those of a lover.

Each night, Morpheus, on stardust-gilded wings, folded lonely Asterion into the hush of dreams. He dreamt of other houses. He saw himself moving through rooms with vaulted ceilings and soft beige carpets, his great shadow stretching across granite countertops, past breakfast bars set with unused wine glasses. The air smelled of lavender plug-ins, of disinfectant. Every room led into another, open concept, smooth and seamless. He wandered past identical staircases, identical pantries stocked with bulk-buy cereals, identical stainless steel refrigerators droning in the dim twilight. Outside the streets coiled in upon themselves, looping back into oblivion.

He would wake to the house’s silence, uncertain if he had truly woken at all.

– Zody Burke

The exhibtion will open on the 3rd of April at 6pm, Hobusepea gallery. A live performance will take place at 7pm by experimental musician & performance artist Nick Klein (US/DE).

Artist bio:
Zody Burke (b.1991, Manhattan) is an American multimedia artist and musician who is currently living and working in Tallinn, Estonia. Informed by her perspective as a New Yorker displaced by the city’s economic inaccessibility, Burke creates cyphers through sculpture and other media through which to cartograph the complexity of American identity within late capitalism, exploring how this mutable identity is refracted and transfigured through the mirror of other cultural spatiality. Often utilizing narrative structures, she is interested in interfacing world-building with geological time, and visualizing a diffusion of boundaries between distinct countries & their national mythologies by the omnipresence of what lies beneath. She recently completed her master’s thesis at the Estonian Academy of Art, which attempted to bridge sociopolitical narratives, legacies, and trajectories of industrialization between Estonia & the USA.