The Brooklyn Rail

A visceral sense of foreboding permeates the basement of Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory museum, where Sudanese artist Azza El Siddique has constructed Echoes to Omega, an ominous site-specific installation reverberating with the weight of the unknown. The artist has built a speculative tomb that subverts the linear narrative of history, evoking both the somberness of mourning and the heavy suspense of impending mortality. Six ceramic reproductions of a statue of Lady Sennuwy, an ancient Egyptian noblewoman, are submerged in oxidized water up to their chests, arranged symmetrically in two rows of three along the sides of the narrow, elongated cellar. The sound of footsteps overhead and the creaking of the museum’s floorboards amplify the installation’s claustrophobic effect, embodied by the statues’ unnerving captivity in their respective subterranean chambers, as water dripping from above creates an entropic cycle they cannot escape.

The history of Lady Sennuwy’s statue provides more questions than answers. Sculpted four thousand years ago in Egypt, the original statue measures five-and-a-half-feet tall, weighs 2,300 lbs, and depicts a beautiful young woman peacefully seated and holding a lotus flower, the symbol of rebirth. It was discovered in 1913 during an archaeological dig in present-day Sudan, emerging from the burial sands of a Nubian king. No one knows why the statue was moved, by whom, or how, only that it had been transported approximately one thousand miles away from its origin, and almost three hundred years after its creation. Now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the statue’s digital 3D scan was published online as an open-source file, which El Siddique used to create her bisque-fired reproductions.

The liquid tomb of each ceramic bust is set within a raised floor of steel grating—an intimidating cage-like material that audibly vibrates as it’s traversed, emitting ambient acoustics reminiscent of lightly clashing symbols. Due to the latticed path’s elevation, each sculpture’s head reaches just below knee height respective to the viewer. This steel matrix continues down the length of the space, culminating at the end of the room with two video monitors displaying excerpts from the Amduat, an ancient Egyptian funerary text translating to “that which is in the underworld” that traces the journey of the dead through the afterlife, an eternal cycle that repeats daily with the rising sun as the deceased is reborn. A central, final altar stands between the videos, a negative space where water infused with an aromatic oil associated with Sudanese Muslim burial rituals activates a heated panel below, hovering in its own watery grave.

El Siddique’s installation further resonates with an uncanny sense of nonconsensual complicity, wherein the viewer stands uncomfortably high above each figure, helpless to stop the methodical drip, drip, drip of single water droplets falling from a metal frame overhead and accumulating in a trail of toxic discoloration that stains each bust as the water returns to its oxidized basin below. The cycle is cumulative, a generative process of rust and disfiguration that will continue to metastasize, spreading across the crown and shoulders of each feminine sculpture like a funeral veil, until the exhibition’s conclusion.

The images published on the museum’s website, which document the beginning of the show’s year-long run, depict pristine busts not yet tainted by rust. By the time I attended the exhibition, several months later on a snowy day in December, the busts are darkly stained and the Sandaliya oil’s smoky scent has been sullied by the odors of mold and mildew—regenerative toxins that will outlive us all, and the incorrigible scourge of every basement in Pittsburgh where it rains or snows, on average, almost every other day.

As such, El Siddique’s installation embraces site-specificity through its passive submission to this foreign environment, much like the migrants and their cross-cultural assimilation that her work ultimately memorializes. The journey of Lady Sennuwy’s statue invokes the artist’s own migration, from Sudan to Canada, and then to the United States. Her haunting incantation of the perpetual cycles of life and death, and the inevitable rise and fall of empires, is substantiated by her use of rust as a time-based material that will eventually turn the silver steel floor shades of burnt orange and an earthen, sanguine red. In Pittsburgh, a crown jewel of the Rust Belt, the collapse of the city’s reigning steel industry led to an exodus of blue-collar workers—a forced migration catalyzed by chronic unemployment, followed by the hard-won emergence decades later of a triumphant economic revival, this time led by tech, health care, and higher education. El Siddique’s themes of decay and renewal, migration, and the transmutation of identities, societies, empires, and ecosystems over time are universal, but her chosen elements of steel, rust, and oxidized water are particularly significant in relation to the Mattress Factory’s site-specific mission.

Echoes to Omega references the phrase “Alpha to Omega,” or “the beginning to the end,” as found in the Book of the Dead and the New Testament, gesturing toward the infinite coil of time. Like the concentric ripples created by rainfall, singular droplets being reclaimed by Earth’s ever-fluctuating bodies of water, we are all submerged in the oscillating echoes of our predecessors—known and unknown—and by the shifting patterns of existence that continue to reveal themselves as the mysteries of life and death unfold around us in every direction. In her resurrection of the ancient mortuary cults whose sacred rituals we still endeavor to understand, El Siddique poetically mythologizes these ancestral permutations and the eternal cycles that have enveloped us since time immemorial.