Angels Listening

An Interactive Cathartic Performance

Angels Listening (2022) is conceived as a meditative space to reflect on pressing issues related to identity, knowledge, time, as well as interpersonal experience and relationships. Featuring seven large-scale angels cast in white bronze, who have been ‘silenced’ as Hovnanian purposefully created the cherubic figures of this installation with two “pieces of tape” sculpted in bronze and covering their mouths, representing the suppression of truth, and offering a reflection on the role of art in this unprecedented historical and social conjuncture. The angels have been artfully staged around a silver confessional box entitled La Scatola Catartica (The Cathartic Box), and the artist invites viewers to write on a ribbon their innermost thoughts, whether repressed due to fear of judgement or sheer inability to speak them. In a performative act of emotional relief through catharsis, the visitor will then place the ribbons into the box while ringing an awakening bell that symbolizes the role of the angels as mute listeners. At the end of each day, the messages will be taken out of the box and compiled as a collective stream-of-consciousness on prayer-like mats dispersed throughout the exhibition space’s garden, stimulating the audience’s personal interpretation. 

The angel is a universal figure, present in Zoroastrian religious texts and those of the major monotheistic faiths, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The angels share a human and divine nature and, at the same time, are at the service of the spiritual progress of the human being. Angels Listening evokes seven angels, as there are seven days in the week, seven frequency bands and colors that create the visible spectrum and seven fundamental units of measurement. Seven bright stars that form the Big Dipper and Ursa Minor constellations, seven heavenly virtues and musical notes and seven deadly sins. Seven is the number of hills that comprise Rome – the core of Western culture – and seven is the Buddhist number of completeness. 

“The way we perceive the world and connect with each other today has been deeply altered by the recent social distancing imposed by the global pandemic as well as the polarized nature of today’s political and cultural systems, which cemented the dominance of technology and alienation over faith and communal experiences. Angels Listening offers a space that transforms hundreds of silenced voices into a chorus of confessions, demonstrating the liberation associated with catharsis and the sanctity of meditative environments in moments of shared isolation.”

-Rachel Lee Hovnanian