mid 1st–late 1st century.
Instructions for use:
The white circles contain individual story elements. Visitors are encouraged to press their ears against the white circles, or use the nearby stethoscopes to listen.
Project Desription:
Pansee Atta’s 50.650 Is There Breath In It, The West uses a hand-painted replica of an Ancient Egyptian funerary shroud with embedded electronic elements telling the story of different winged symbols, asking how they allow us to better understand our relationship with nature, life, and death. Based on a Ptolemaic-era portrait shroud currently housed in the Boston Museum of Fine Art (see link below for details), it draws attention to the ways that humans have long considered our complex relationships with the natural world, imagining hybrid creatures that play important roles in mediating our relationship with life and death. Echoes of the winged humanoid ba figure, for example, may be seen across Egypt’s diverse faith traditions in symbols like angels.
At the same time, this project combines multiple overlapping hybridities: high tech and traditional artistic media, differing Greco-Roman and Ancient Egyptian visual styles, and of course, animal-human hybrid creatures are a prominent part of Ancient Egyptian mythologies. Similarly, its title, 50.650 ls There Breath In It, The West, combines its original museum inventory number with a prayer from a Ptolemaic-era funerary ritual, bringing together both the objectifying distance with which museums have regarded such objects, and the human element of grief, hope, and loss.
Along these lines, by encouraging the use of both medical and tactile means of listening to the audio narratives, this project imagines counter-museological means of engaging with Ancient Egyptian human remains and grave goods. Through a form of reimagined funerary ritual that brings together the ancient and modern, this project asks how embodied participation with otherwise untouchable objects might re-imbue the hurma – the autonomy or inviolability – of the ancient dead.
Museum catalogue information on the original shroud:
https://collections.mfa.org/objects/148403