Free Instruments – Mask of a woman

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What if you could touch the artifacts at the museum? What if they could respond?


In line with my current work on decolonizing collections of Ancient Egyptian artifacts, this piece titled “Free Instruments: Mask of a Woman” consists of a “replica” of a mummy mask on display at the Allard Pierson museum in Amsterdam, integrated with conductive metallic paint and electronics that allow it to be played as an instrument when it is touched. Doing so, the works in this series challenge the idea that such valued objects must solely be viewed as “artifacts”; that is, as objects to be studied and observed in perpetuity from behind glass. By turning them into instruments that not only permit but require touch, they are put back into communities, given life once more, as well as the agency to respond differently to the different ways they might be handled.


This specific mask was chosen as it contains both Roman and Egyptian stylistic elements,
representing a form of cultural hybridity and a moment in which Ancient Egypt was experiencing rapid social change, as contemporary Egypt is today. By integrating ancient aesthetics with high-tech, electronic and digital components, this work decolonizes the way audiences think about artifacts by placing them as part of a living, dynamic artistic tradition. Touch is intrinsic to this work, as it produces different tones (llike a musical instrument) when it is touched, pressed, and caressed in different ways.


The mummy mask’s original gold coating is replaced in my version with brass, which has a similar appearance but which is deliberately patinated to encourage audiences to re-think the “artifact” from being an invaluable “treasure” that should be preserved forever, to something beautiful and alive but fundamentally utilitarian that will change as it is used and handled.

The shiny, matte, rough, and smooth surfaces give the work a complex tactility which is echoed in the musical tones it produces, since these different coatings all have different conductive properties. As a result, the tones it produces are a combination of the way it is touched and the specific surface being touched, so it can be explored auditorily as well as visually. In this way, this piece only truly comes alive when it is touched, decolonizing the way Ancient Egyptian artifacts are understood by removing them from museum display cases and encouraging a kind of bodily communion with the ancient dead.

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Exhibited as a workshop with inherit: Heritage in Transformation at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

What Have We Here?

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Photo credit: Aratrika K. Installation view of collaborative mural at Troef.

Leiden is a city defined by its historical, cultural and artistic heritage, but where is the continuity? Where are the young artists of the city? In ‘What Have We Here?’, five artists (Aratrika K, Erik Eska, Sam WF en Pansee Atta) connected to Leiden will explore these and other questions. TROEF functions as a shared studio, where they come together to work collectively on a series of interventions within and beyond the exhibition space. These interventions aim to meet the city of Leiden and its people as they are, rather than how they are represented.

My part of the collaborative project consisted of a mass of images adapted from both (Ancient) Egypt and the Netherlands, and an invitation to visitors to envision strange, new hybrid forms with them. With visitor and collaborating artist contributions, the mural gradually evolved over the course of the exhibition.

Thinking through ways of liberating Leiden’s histories and collections, this collaboration was a way of allowing these ‘migrant’ symbols to gain new life outside the museum, as enacted through citizen’s hands. With images based on an open-source repository of Ancient Egyptian images, I envisioned this project as a kind of democratic, open-source alternative to museum exhibitionary structures.

Article about the exhibition (in Dutch):

https://sleutelstad.nl/2026/06/28/wat-hebben-we-hier-groepstentoonstelling-troef

Collaborative mural in Troef
Collaborative mural in Troef
Collaborative mural in Troef
Collaborative mural in Troef
Collaborative mural in Troef
What Have We Here poster. Credit: Troef.

Egyptian Goose (Nijlgans) & Flight into Egypt

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‘Flight into Egypt’ is a multimedia art project combining representations of the Egyptian Goose (Nijlgans) with Dutch Golden Age paintings of the Biblical scene of the ‘Flight into Egypt’.

The Nijlgans, widely extant in the Netherlands, has recently and controversially been classified as an invasive species in the EU, with rhetorics about its danger and aggression echoing anti-immigrant narratives. Reports urging the species’ culling disregard evidence that its native habitat range has always extended into Europe, and that its presence in the Netherlands is the result of climate change as much as human introduction.
The idea that the Netherlands and Egypt (and Europe and the Middle East more generally) have always been interlinked is echoed in Dutch Golden Age paintings of the Biblical scene of the ‘Flight into Egypt’. In these artworks, the Holy Family flees Jerusalem for safety in Egypt. Yet the landscape depicted by Dutch artists is consistently European, thereby imagining the Holy Family as seeking refuge close by, rather than somewhere distant and exotic. The distance between first-century Egypt and the contemporary Netherlands is folded into one, and empathy is extended to those forced to flee home against their will.
In my series of paintings and sculptures, I imagine human-Nijlgans hybrids in a style that combines Egyptian and European art, placing them in re-imagined versions of ‘The Flight into Egypt’ by Breughel, Rembrandt, Cuyp and others. These re-imagined histories intertwine human and animal migration, and the ways we understand them in the present. The goose-human hybrids are more than a reference of Ancient Egyptian representations of animal-headed gods; they also represent the deeply intertwined ways in which humans have always shaped the natural world, and vice versa.

The moon upon its fourteenth night

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This sculpture was conceived as part of To Be Continued: Troubling the Queer Archive, an exhibition set to open September 19th in a semi-virtual form at Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa, Canada. The show, curated by Anna Shah Hoque and Cara Tierney, examines queer BIPOC histories, and so my premise was to create this life-sized, figurative archive of LGBTQ identities in Middle Eastern history. 

I used the visual reference to henna, a very interpersonal, bodily practice, to make a conductive surface out of copper tape and conductive pigments, which works as an antenna for a capacitive sensor, which, in turn, controls the volume of the audio that emits from the speaker in the mouth. The audio tells the story of Qamar-al-Zaman and Princess Budour from the 1001 Nights. With records dating back to the 14th century Middle East , it tells a fun, raunchy story of gender-bending and same-sex desire, as well as misunderstandings, adventure, and mischievous Jinn.  It challenges the way gender norms in Muslim history are understood, and to hear it, you need to get very physically close to the sculpture, generating a kind of intimacy with your body’s electric capacitance and its androgynous form and many limbs.

While it was initially conceived as a directly touchable artwork, it was re-thought a bit due to the pandemic, with distance- instead of touch-sensing to perform the same functions without, y’know, risking viewer’s lives.

To historically preserve the archive, I created a perma.cc link with the project audio, schematic, and various forms of documentation, all of which can be accessed through the QR code on the figure’s belly.

In my mind, this figure is a sort of time traveller, sent from a future in which gender and sexual identity is freely determined, sent back in time to tell us of a part of our history which we’ve forgotten. This is part of why it’s covered in crystals: used for timekeeping, I think of its body and our bodies as historical archives in their own right, accessed though intimacy, connection, and the intrinsic capacitance they create.

Planning

I started off by making a 3d model to use as a reference/ sketch.

Which I then “sliced” into 1″ flat sections, and printed their outlines on paper.

Sculpting

I cut out all the pieces from Foamular XPS (basically just pink insulation foam), glued them together, and used weights and tape to keep them in place.

I then started roughly shaping the foam, mostly with a serrated kitchen knife.

Further shaping of the anatomy, now using a file, ~40 grit sandpaper, and the serrated knife.

At this point I used the Hot Wire Foam Factory’s ‘Create Coat’ product to seal the foam and smooth it somewhat

I decided I wanted it smoothed and built up further, so I used a polymer-modified, smooth concrete on top of the Create Coat.

Finishing the concrete coat, sanding, smoothing.

I decided at this point that I didn’t like the face, so I did some digital remodelling using Blender.

Based (roughly) on the 3D model, I made a version of the new face out of cheap, home-made ‘clay’

Then I made a mold of the new face, cast it in concrete, and put it in place of the old face.

This then took a bit of smoothing to get it looking right.

(At this point I realized I should start thinking about what the weird crystal protrusions would look like…)

(But I wouldn’t be attaching the crystals until near the end, so back to the sculpture!)

Now that the cement has created a barrier from the (very solvent-sensitive) foam base, I coated it with “Rondo”, a mixture of fiberglass and Bondo.

I also started modeling the fingers out of a combination of 1-part silicone, starch, and pigment.

Once it was fully coated, I gave it several solid coats of primer.

(It’s hard to tell in the photos, but those silicone fingers are bendy and soft!

Refining details + initial paint coat.

Oh, I also removed one of the arms early on so I could take it home and figure out the electronics stuff on it.

Sculpture is basically just a lot of building stuff up, then sanding it down, then building it up, then sanding it down…

Adding some initial paint layers to further define the face.

Starting to paint and shade the body. The actual sculpting of the figure is mostly done at this point!

Electronics

This part took a lot of experimentation. The general idea was that I wanted the conductive copper on the arm to function as an antenna for the capacitive sensor, which would translate a person’s distance into audio volume.

This is the basic schematic I ended up settling on. I used the Teensy 3.6’s hardware-based TouchSense library to read the values coming in from the distance sensor, which were then fed into an Audio Shield attached to the Teensy to control the volume, which was sent to the speaker in the mouth. Oh, and there’s an amp and a decoupling filter in there too. 

More sculpture...

Re-attached the right front arm, and added copper tape to the left front arm.

Carving out space in the back of the neck for the electronics.

Putting the electronics in place in a clear plexiglass box I made. Finally!

Modeling the crystals with cardboard (and you can see the speaker in place in the mouth here)

Filled the crystals with expanding foam, then coated them in pigmented fiberglass.

(Some of the crystals are actually cast in resin, too, like the ones around the right eye)

Adding translucent layers of paint to further integrate the crystals, electronics, and body. 

Lots and lots of gradual painting and refining…

Put a lil’ QR code on the tum using an acrylic transfer, and that’s basically it!

And here it is, installed at the gallery!

And here it is, installed at the gallery!

we only liberate ourselves by binding our liberations to those of one another

by PanseeAttaart, UncategorizedPosted on Comments are Disabled

 

“How can public art work with, against and beyond the monumental? How can it scale up to address the monumentality of environmental extraction, the long reverberations of colonial violence, or the depths of ideological entrenchments?

Pansee Atta explores these questions in her video projection we only liberate ourselves by binding our liberations to those of one another, which visualizes the counter-monumental as an intervention upon a practice that has directly shaped local histories, politics and geographies in the National Capital Region: the containment of water – a legacy manifested most prominently in the Rideau Canal and Chaudière Falls.

Understanding containment of bodies – of water and persons – to be a foundational ordering logic of colonial expansion, Atta uses her video projection to create a space of excess, setting in motion a counter-flow of uncontainable, surging corporeality. Streams of animated bodies, ungovernable in their form and function, reject atomization to operate as a fundamentally interdependent swarm of subjectivities. Assembling perpetually, they scale up a rocky natural facade of Victoria Island, seemingly emerging out of the watery depths and interacting with the contours of their environment.

Rather than creating a discrete, contained video with a fixed duration, Atta’s compositional strategy is itself an uncontainable system, operating on a continuously running animation script that randomly generates streams of monstrous figures, each mutually aiding one another as they scale the height of the frame. As such, Atta’s work may be viewed indefinitely without encountering a single repetition – a formal irreducibility that exceeds the structural rigor of containment and its relations of enclosure. This is an unruly radiance, bound together by allyship, and borne of a shared struggle.”

https://www.sawvideo.com/knot/projection/we-only-liberate-ourselves-binding-our-liberations-those-one-another

bust of nefertiti

I Am Not Asking For the Moon

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 “I am not asking for the moon,” 2018. 5 3D-printed thermoplastic polymer and resin sculptures, approx. 30 x 30 x 30 cm. Accompanied by looping GIF animations.

For more information on this project, check out the installation shots and write-up by the brilliant Julie Hollenbach at the MSVU website here.

The Bust of Nefertiti

The Statue of Great Pyramid Architect Hem-iunu

Bust of Prince Ankhhaf

The Dendera Zodiac

The Rosetta Stone

a pair of brown hands detangle brown threads over a map of north africa and the middle east

Projections

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PROJECTIONSIn cartography, a projection is a transformation of the three-dimensional shape of the planet onto a two-dimensional surface. Mapped projections, by definition, distort the surface to some extent: some of the most accurate projections are less legible due to the lines of division and intersection, whereas some of the most recognizable projections (such as the …

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