TECHNE | "Voices" @ BAM
“Voices” by Margarita Athanasiou Shown as part of TECHNE from Jan 12-15, 2025
WHERE: BAM Fisher, Fishman Space 321 Ashland Pl Brooklyn, NY 11217
DATES: Jan 12 - 15, 2025
HOURS: Sunday from 2-10pm, Tuesday + Wednesday from 7-10pm
VOICES is a video essay about the history of channeling practices. It weaves together archival material, found footage, and original content to trace the evolution of New Age spirituality, its symbiotic relationship with emerging technologies, and its role as a tool for personal and collective transformation.
The work is deeply personal, drawing from my own experiences channeling with my mother as a kid and incorporating interviews with other family members. Initially including a larger scope of spiritual practices engaging in possession rituals, the narrative of VOICES was slowly narrowed down to the specific lineage of practices I had personally been exposed to.
In this way, the project functions both as a historical investigation—tracing a type of spiritual family tree —and as a poetic reflection on what it means to inhabit one’s body. The act of channeling, of lending your voice to unseen forces, becomes a metaphor for transcending the individual, but also modernity itself. The body in this paradigm is framed as the ultimate communications device and the ghost that inhabits it for a bit, as the perfect teacher.
Beginning in 1850s New York with the Spiritualists, VOICES moves through time, arriving in the digital age, always toying with the role of the disembodied narrator as another source of divine truth. The fragmented tale jumps back and forth across history, focusing on the lives of a few female practitioners whose experiences and relationships with the entities they channeled form the poetic body of the work. The collage process of forming a narrative out of disparate visual and textual materials resembles creating a digital scrapbook. It reflects on the New Age as a copy-and-paste spiritual movement, while also referencing the feminine traditions of stitching and collage in Victorian-era crafts.
Through this blending of past and present, the work examines how the advent of technology reshapes not just our understanding of the metaphysical, but also our capacity for agency. While critically engaging with the aggressive cultural appropriation, americano-centrism, and overall whiteness of this space, the history of mediumship (often dismissed as esoteric or fringe) is reimagined as a persisting practice that provides pathways for empowerment, particularly for women who have historically been silenced or marginalized.
My goal while making this work was to explore my complex relationship with these practices but also to create a space for suspension of disbelief, a fun, mystical, often romantic world where the viewer is invited to engage with the relationship between mind, body, and machine, and to reconsider the boundaries between the spiritual and the technological.
I mean, are you not channeling right now? ;)
Margarita Athanasiou is a media artist based in Athens, Greece. Her practice is text-based, utilises collage techniques and brings together autobiography and history to create multi-layered narratives in the form of publications, video essays, prints, memes and digital images.
TECHNE is curated by Onassis ONX, an initiative by Onassis Culture dedicated to the development of new media art and digital experiences. Presented in partnership with Under the Radar and BAM, January 4 through 19, a part of BAM’s Next Wave 2024 and Emerging Visions, as well as Under the Radar ‘25. Visit utrfest.org and bam.org for more information.
Bloomberg Philanthropies is BAM’s Season Sponsor. Leadership support for BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by the Mellon Foundation. Leadership support for BAM Access Programs provided by the Jerome L. Greene Foundation. Leadership support for Next Wave 2024 provided by Ford Foundation. Leadership support for BAM’s strategic initiatives provided by Altman Foundation.
