STATEMENT

Amodali is a multimedia artist. She uses sound, extended vocal techniques, performance, illustration, typography, mixed-media collage and sculpture to explore esotericism, sexuality, feminism and post-human philosophy. She suggests that the symbolic narratives which define femininity within esotericism should be challenged and the ontological role of women transformed accordingly through embodied ‘biognostic’ practices.  Her work is concerned with excavating the phenomenology of altered states of consciousness experienced by women in order to retrieve psychic and physical aspects of the female ‘magical body’ which have been rejected or less explored within the Western magical tradition.  Destabilizing traditional models of gendered participation in esoteric practices also has the effect of bringing queer theory into a discourse which draws on Luce Irigaray’s concepts of 'radical immanence' and progressive notions of the divine feminine as well as New Materialist discourse on post-human interaction with the biosphere and cosmos—theories which reshape how we perceive our relationships with matter from atomic particles through to the universe in macrocosm. Her research shares philosopher Timothy Morton’s speculation on mysticism’s ‘reserves of unthought zones of materiality’ and suggests that progressive, esoteric conceptualizations of sexuality can provide physical mechanisms for such unthought zones to manifest and break down barriers between human and non-human life.  In this way, it is possible to simultaneously explore the somatic roots of being within a liminal, fluidic space of intercommunion, in which one’s psycho-physical being is open to transformation.  In this terrain, the binary nature of existence is not only defined as male/female but is also experienced as a biphasic ‘loop’ or borderland between bio-physical/psychic essence and the embodied ground from which one interacts with all sentience and the biosphere—extending sexuality beyond the human body and traditional gendered dynamics.

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