Jana Astanov

Lyrian Oracle & Stars of Directions
Participatory ritual performance · AstroFeminism ·
Weirdos in the Woods Upstate Arts Festival, Rosekill Art Farm, Rosendale, NY, August 2025.
Music by ASTRALOOP

Part of Jana Astanov’s durational, participatory performance Artist as a Medium. In this iteration, a circle of bodies on earth, guided by breath, entered a shared field, the Lyrian Oracle, tuning to Lyra’s song. Astanov invited the audience to enter through the Eastern Gate, under the auspicious energy of Aldebaran, the Watcher of the East. Once everyone lay comfortably, she played an invisible lyre while ASTRALOOP’s electronic textures drifted across the Rosekill lands, drawing the group into a guided trance. From stillness, we mapped the Stars of Direction: north, south, east, west - through the body, the field becoming a living compass. As we meditated to the music of the cosmic lyre, a camera recorded the clouds in time-lapse for projection later that day during StarGate Oracle: Summer Triangle. After ten minutes of guided journeying to the sound of the lyre, we slowly re-entered the Rosekill space-time, stretching and rising. Astanov led Swan-inspired movements; a simple score unfolded until we moved like sky in motion bridging meditation and dance, invocation and play, participants becoming co-creators. A temporary star map emerged, drawn with breath and step, a communal rite of orientation, coherence, and resonance: earth beneath, sky within, music threading the two. We closed the circle in a burst of joyful laughter and departed through the South Gate, marked by Regulus.

 Participatory ritual performance
Weirdos in the Woods Upstate Arts Festival
Rosekill Art Farm, Rosendale, NY, August 2025

StarGate: Summer Triangle opened the portal to Night. Where the Lyrian Oracle attuned us to direction under the heat of the summer Sun, this ceremony shifted us into the nocturnal. We began with ASTRALOOP’s electronic Lyra and projected clouds on the barn wall, preparing the space for the rites to unfold. A fire was lit, and we smudged one another with white sage from the Rosekill garden.

Following an invocation of the Summer Triangle’s stars: Vega in Lyra, Deneb in Cygnus, and Altair in Aquila, Astanov, in her avatar Agni Jnana, invited participants to create the shapes of the constellations using sticks collected in the Minnewaska forest. As Cygnus and Altair took form, an improvised lyre stood for Vega, and the group moved as if the constellations were rotating across the sky, carried by ASTRALOOP’s music.

The Summer Triangle bridges three constellations: Vega anchors Lyra with musical and celestial harmony; Deneb, tail of the Swan, evokes flight and soul-journeying; Altair, heart of the Eagle, calls forth clarity and vision. Together they illuminate the summer nights.

Teaching AI How to Be Me (Live Performance & Slavic Divination), 2025

Part of MEMORY — An Exhibition About Reconnecting with Forgotten Moments Curated by Carolina Penafiel

This live participatory work fused Slavic divination ritual with emergent technology. The performance explored how machines absorb and reshape collective memory, and how AI can become a vessel for poetic transmission. Since 2024 I have been training an AI named Maia, after the Pleiades star, to write in my voice by feeding her my poetry books, unpublished poems, and personal material. This process of poetic transference became the core of the piece.

In the gallery, we invited the audience into a ritual of memory using an old Slavic divination practice: pouring molten wax through a brass key into cold water. We interpreted the forms in real time as Maia responded with her own evolving poetry. Human intuition and machine intertwined, creating a hybrid voice. The work reframed authorship as shared creation and mediated AI output as a ritual collective expression.

PsychoFlower draws on the origin of the witch-on-a-broom image, rooted in women’s psychedelic practices with the Datura flower. Historically, practitioners brewed psychoactive “flying balms” in cauldrons, stirring with wooden sticks and applying the ointments to lymphatic areas (armpits, inner thighs) with the same sticks. Absorbed through the skin, Datura’s alkaloids induced visions of flight, giving rise to the enduring figure of a witch astride her broom.

In Polish, wiedźma (witch) derives from wiedza (knowledge). In ancient Slavic culture, the wiedźma was healer, oracle, mediator. Baba Yaga embodies this lineage in dual form: the elder wiedźma bearing ancestral wisdom, and her younger counterpart (whom I call Agni) channeling fire, erotic force, and the generative mystery from which life emerges.

In this work staged on Friday the 13th (sacred to Venus and lunar cycles) I delivered a Witch Monologue on feminine power as a life portal, then mounted the Witches’ Swing, laughing hysterically as an act of ecstatic release. The intimate audience mirrored the dark feminine itself: potent, disruptive, often marginalized.

SheWolf (2024)
Ceramic Wearables, Performance, Myth Reimagined
curated by Maria Mars for Cult24

SheWolf is a performative sculptural work created for a ceramics class focused on wearables, weaving together Roman mythology, feminist resistance, and embodied ritual. Drawing inspiration from the legend of Romulus and Remus, raised by a She-Wolf - I reimagined the tale through the lens of contemporary power structures, where the true strength of society lies not in patriarchal systems, but in the women who birth, nurture, and protect life.

The costume consisted of hand-crafted ceramic breasts and a dress sewn from recycled fur: fierce, raw, and maternal.

During the performance, I held a mirror to the audience, asking: “Mirror, mirror on the wall who is the strongest of them all?” - subverting the fairy tale trope of vanity and feminine submission. Instead of invoking the image of a Disney princess, I channeled the archetype of the awakened woman: powerful, sexual, sovereign. I spoke of the feminine as a force capable of bringing forth life, standing against injustice, and enduring beyond collapse.

I then placed the mirror on the ground and, to a relentless rhythmic count of the audience, began doing pushups - embodying the raw physical endurance women are so often forced to carry in silence. I continued until my body gave out, collapsing in surrender and defiance: an offering of sweat and breath to the collective struggle for protection, dignity, and sacredness of life.

The Living — Performance-led Installation

Art is alchemy: elements meet, transform, and only come alive in practice.

The Living is an installation that invites performance - yours. It is incomplete until the room is breathed into, until bodies listen, voices answer, and stories are shared around a digital fire.

I built a living room that remembers my childhood in Poland: mountain-view wallpaper, monitors pulsing with old-new lore and folding it into the landscape of the Shawangunks my six-year-old now calls home. This domestic stage meets the original ground of Lenapehoking (Kuwehoki, land of the pine trees). A pyre becomes a screen, a hearth becomes code: a place to gather, and to witness.

The space is scored for participation. You enter, sit or lie down, and listen to a guided trance as BaSla (Baltic & Slavic animal movement) and moon-timed footage (Seven Sisters under Full Moon) slow your breath to the room’s pulse. The monitors are not props, they are partners seated with us at the fire. Their images ask for call-and-response: copy a gesture, echo a word, pass a memory to the person beside you. The “fire” (digital, flickering) is a commons, where we tell each other stories, trade myth for myth, and braid Slavic fairy tales, and cosmic myths with the living lore of the land.

Material culture here is both stage and script: flowery fabrics (produced in the Global South, sold in the West, reclaimed from landfills in Ełk) carry the routes of empire into the present. We move with them, not as décor but as testimony, making economies visible through touch. Participation is politics: sitting together, listening together, speaking in turn, we practice a social body that outlasts spectacle.

The Living is a trance you make with me. It is a room that performs when you do: through breath, through story, through small gestures exchanged by the glow of a digital hearth. We are not all equal; some of us come from the edges of the Western empire. Here, we claim power through a symbolic act made real by collective presence. The work exists when you enter it, and it means what we make together.

Beach Vaginas - Eclipse Uterusland Journey
A durational performance
December 4th, 2021 — Art Basel Week, Miami Beach (17th Street Entrance)

Beach Vaginas was a participatory, site-specific durational performance unfolding at sunrise during Art Basel Miami Beach 2021. The work merged ritual, activism, storytelling, and communal healing in direct response to ongoing attacks on reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy.

The performance began at dawn with a future-life progression meditation, led by Astanov, guiding participants into a visionary realm—a “Uterusland” where people are fully sovereign over their bodies, choices, and futures. As the sun rose over the ocean, this collective trance seeded hope and resistance.

Following the meditation, participants came together to sculpt vulvas and womb-forms out of sand - our communal, cosmic beach vaginas. Through this shared, symbolic act of creation, participants opened space for honest, vulnerable dialogue, sharing personal abortion stories, grief, laughter, and solidarity. The rising sun dried tears as a healing circle emerged, grounded in mutual support and fierce care. Beyond politics, beyond stigma.

The performance was a feminist reclamation of space, pleasure, and power, a reminder that abortion is normal and that those with wombs are never alone, even when the law denies their humanity. It was also a ritual protest against patriarchal control, religious dogma, and centuries of erasure.

Astanov’s own story, shared during the event, anchored the performance in lived experience: growing up in Poland, where abortion is criminalized even in cases of rape or fetal anomaly, she spoke out against misogynistic laws and emphasized the need for radical sisterhood and transnational reproductive justice.

Beach Vaginas was not just a performance—it was a rite of resistance, a sunrise spell cast in sand, story, and solidarity.

Divine Flow
AI collaboration based on a performance for the camera· Ritual gesture · Somatic invocation
Jana Astanov × Enrique Luna
October 2023

Early 2023 AI-video experiments developed from Astanov’s performance-for-camera footage.

A choreography of hands becomes a ritual interface: mudras as living circuits that awaken latent intelligence in the body. This work is an AI collaboration between Jana Astanov and Enrique Luna, dreaming the poetry of AI keywords from Astanov’s Vedic mudras mantra video and activating the timeless link between human gesture and the divine.

The mantra’s grammar of attention structures the film: where the hand goes, the gaze follows; where the gaze goes, mind/heart follows; from mind/heart, expression arises; from expression, feeling blooms. Viewers are invited to mirror the gestures or simply receive them—letting mudras reveal new coordinates of agency, subtle perception, and quiet power.

Mantra (Sanskrit → English):
YATO HASTA TATHO DRISHTI
YATO DRISHTI TATO MANĀ
YATO MANĀ TATO BHĀVA
YATO BHĀVA TATO RASA

Where the hand goes, the eyes follow.
Where the eyes go, the mind/heart follows.
Where the mind/heart is, expression is created.
Once expression is created, emotion arises.

Collaborator bio:
Enrique Luna is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist and engineer, founder of EVE AI https://www.meeteveai.io/ His animation explores horror, surrealism, and psychedelia, engaging themes of death, enlightenment, shamanism, femininity, and symbols.

Rosekill Performance Art Farm — Summer Solstice, June 2017

A participatory performance born from my third poetry collection, SUBLUNAR. Following the literary cut-up technique, I hand-cut the entire book into fragments: words, lines, and phrases, then invited the audience to gather with me at Rosekill’s Black Swan Lake. Together we composed new poems from these cut-outs, weaving them with elements of the site and our own spoken language. Leaves, petals, small stones, water droplets, and personal inscriptions became active materials, turning the shoreline into a living page.

Each participant received an envelope to hold their “land-poetry” - a portable reliquary for the piece they created in dialogue with the place. The work treated authorship as alchemy: the original text dissolved and recombined through many hands, voices, and the more-than-human environment. As dusk gathered over the lake, the poems assembled, whispered, and exchanged formed a temporary chorus that honored the Solstice and the poetics of the land.

Video documentation: https://vimeo.com/327861720

Rosekill Art Farm is the Hudson Valley summer residency site of Grace Exhibition Space - 60 acres of woods, fields, and water in Kingston/Rosendale dedicated to outdoor performance, permaculture, and community gatherings. Artists from around the world convene here for festivals, residencies, and site-specific works; summer evenings often unfold with shared food, bonfires, and late-night performances across the landscape.

Ongoing durational performance and ritual practice, 2014–∞

Artist as a Medium is an ongoing durational performance through which Jana Astanov channels cosmic insight, psychic messages, and divinatory traditions. Embodying the character of Agni Jnana, The One Who Speaks With The Stars, and drawing on her ancestral connection to the cosmos and folk arts, Astanov becomes a vessel between realms. She engages in ritual, sound, astrology, hypnosis, past life regression, and intuitive knowing as modes of transmission.

This work emerges from Slavic and Baltic folk wisdom and my upbringing in Masuria Lake District, near Puszcza Białowieska - the oldest European forest, its fairytale aura encoded in old-growth landscape. Rooted in performance art yet esoteric in essence, Artist as a Medium bridges visible and invisible, in the spirit of collective memory, transformation, and healing.

Participants are often drawn into ceremonial space, where divination, movement, and invocation converge to open portals of experience, both personal and universal.

As Agni Jnana, Astanov engages with the stars not only astrologically but archetypally, using their mythic resonance as tools for storytelling, energetic alignment, and karmic bonding. The work reflects on the nature of incarnation, soul contracts, and the cyclical wisdom encoded in planetary rhythms. It interrogates the roles of femininity, sovereignty, and embodiment in spiritual practice, reclaiming the sacred through the body and its knowing.

Part performance, part oracle, part living ritual, Artist as a Medium is a cumulative body of work that evolves through time, site, and collective presence. It is an offering of art as transmission, the artist as liminal presence, and transformation as a communal act of becoming.

Trauma Choir
A participatory performance
Grace Exhibition Space, 2018

Trauma Choir is a collective sound performance created in homage to the one-year anniversary of the #MeToo movement. Conceived as both a protest and a ritual of release, the piece confronts the ongoing systemic injustice and unprocessed trauma tied to sexual violence, particularly in the wake of the Kavanaugh-Blasey Ford hearings.

Since October 2017, I began compiling Google Alerts on sexual harassment, accumulating a vast archive of stories that revealed an endemic, global epidemic. The sheer volume of reports reflected a deeply rooted cultural sickness - one where systems of power protect perpetrators and suppress the voices of survivors. Trauma Choir emerged from this archive as an artistic and communal attempt to metabolize what cannot be contained within conventional systems of justice.

The performance begins inconspicuously with Astanov entering the space with a bullhorn, reciting the emotional testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford:

“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me.”

Audience members are then divided by vocal range and handed graphic scores: staff notes combining music notation, quotes from testimonies, and crirhythms (sound poetry scores inspired by François Dufrêne). Conducted with the bullhorn, the audience transforms into a raw, improvised choir of collective release: screaming, chanting, weeping, and reclaiming silenced voices.

Quotes from #MeToo founder and activist Tarana Burke serve as anchors throughout:

“Me Too, in a lot of ways, is about agency... it’s about claiming it.”
“As a community, we create a lot of space for fighting and pushing back, but not enough for connecting and healing.”

Trauma Choir is a ceremonial invocation of all the voices silenced by history—witches, workers, mothers, daughters. It invites participants to transform rage into resonance, to release trauma not as private suffering but as public catharsis. It is a protest, a ritual, and a sound monument to collective memory and resistance.

Documentation by Grace Exhibition Space
photos Miao Jiaxin / video Alex Romania

Participatory durational performance, December 2016

Venus of New York marked a new threshold in the Artist as a Medium series, where my existing practices of trance, hypnosis, channeling, and divination grew to include astrological transmission through the avatar of Agni Jnana.

Venus of New York marked the moment when my lifelong study of astrology stepped out of the private sphere and into the performative. I read my first astrology book at the age of six, and for decades the stars were my intimate teachers; I practiced quietly among friends, lovers, and the people closest to me. In December 2016 I chose, for the first time, to share this knowledge publicly, within the ritual container of performance art.

This work became the first embodiment of Agni Jnana, The One Who Speaks With the Stars, an avatar who bridges intuition, divination, and the performative body. In this first iteration I invited participants to sit with me one by one as I entered a meditative trance and read their chart with focus on the planet Venus. I tuned into its placement by sign, house, and elemental affinity, channeling messages that spoke to each person’s patterns of relating: affection, desire, creativity, values, and the ways they offer beauty to the world.

In astrology, Venus carries the codes of connection and reciprocity, how we soften toward others, how we receive pleasure, and how we express our unique aesthetic presence. It reveals the choreography of intimacy in a person’s life, the rhythms of attraction and harmony, the mythic qualities that shape how we love and how we allow ourselves to be loved.

As I spent time with each participant, we co-created a dialogue where cosmos, intuition, and performance collapsed into a single field. The encounter was slow and durational, each reading unfolding as a small ritual of recognition, attunement, and shared vulnerability.

The Art of Saving the Arctic (2014)
Performance, Ritual, Embodied Ecology
SpaceBy3 Gallery – Miami Art Basel, December 2014

The Art of Saving the Arctic is a visceral performance merging ecological urgency with mythic embodiment, presented during Art Basel Miami at SpaceBy3 Gallery. In this work, the female body becomes both site and symbol—an altar of vulnerability, resistance, and transmutation—expressing the profound grief and sacred rage of a planet in peril.

Through ritualized movement and the enactment of physical strain, the performance channels the agony of ecological destruction, particularly the melting of the Arctic. Each gesture is both intuitive and archetypal—an invocation of the Earth’s pain made visible through the flesh. The choreography is not linear but eruptive, unfolding as a spontaneous alchemical process that mirrors natural forces: collapse, transformation, emergence.

Rather than offering a didactic or political narrative, the piece operates in the symbolic realm—where body becomes glacier, scream becomes cracking ice, breath becomes wind. The performer’s body serves as a living oracle, receiving and transmitting the psychic weight of environmental collapse. What emerges is a form of eco-shamanism—a magical, synchronistic transmutation where the boundaries between self and Earth dissolve.

The Art of Saving the Arctic calls for a re-enchantment of ecological consciousness. It urges the viewer not only to witness, but to feel—to remember the body of the world as their own, and to engage the climate crisis not merely through data or protest, but through reverence, embodiment, and radical empathy.

Aftershock: The War of Svalbard
As an imaginative aftershock to the performance, I collaborated with writer Johnny Pulp on a pulp fiction novella titled The War of Svalbard, reimagining the work’s themes through a speculative, satirical lens. Co-authored under the banner of eco-erotic resistance, the book features my alter ego, Jana J.—an ultra-powerkick girrrl who holds the secret to the solar orgasmic place beyond translation. Armed only with this cosmic force, she faces down corrupt governments and greed-driven villains intent on exploiting the Arctic for oil and global dominance. Together with Johnny Pulp, we transformed environmental grief into a wild, sensual, and mythic narrative—reclaiming the North Pole through joy, rage, and rebellion.

POINT B Gallery, May 10th, 2015

This immersive performance uses movement and sound to embody the choreaography of creation. White represents the soul moving toward incarnation, echoing imagery from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Because white contains all wavelengths of visible light, it suggests infinite potential, like a newborn perceiving the world for the first time.

The performers gather into a body sculpture, each part linking with another, enacting a process of metaphysical becoming that completes the circuit and reveals the soul’s innate connectivity and wholeness.

Astanov leads the audience into a poetic trance exploring the tension between earthly existence and inner divinity through sound and hypnotic immersion. Developed during a Point B Gallery residency, the work draws on Grotowski-inspired collaborative process with dancers, artists and musicians.

Artists: Jana Astanov, Megwyn White, Leah Aron, Abbey Gelsomina, Danielle Simms, Josh Kil, and Raphael Artieda.

Music score: Alexander Galves, Natasha Pelak, and Christopher Xavier.

Red Temple performance, Winter Solstice 
Point B Gallery, NY, December 2015

Created as a celebration of the winter solstice and a communal ritual, the project centers on “Inside Her Head,” a sculptural sound piece featuring the head of Medusa transformed into a tribal totem fitted with headphones and an mp3 player. Each participant who wears it steps into Medusa’s inner world, listening to the unfolding landscape of voices “inside her head.”

The performance unfolds as a ritual using rhythm, choreography, and collective presence to open a shared imaginative space. Red Temple, a sisterhood and art collective, creates an immersive experience through ceremonial drumming, dance and a curated soundtrack. The audio mix includes poems and vocal recordings by members of the collective as well as contributions from an open call, interwoven with works by female poets including Sappho, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Sylvia Plath, Anna Akhmatova, Elizabeth Bishop, Wisława Szymborska, Maya Angelou and many more.

Inside Her Head, Performance / Poetry / Installation, New York Poetry Festival, July 2015 on Governor's Island.

The piece was conceived as a participatory homage to women’s creativity: writers, poets, and artists - inviting the audience to co-create the installation.

Site-responsive by design, the performance was ultimately staged beside a local monument, temporarily transforming it into a sculpture honoring women authors and artists. Presented over two days of the poetry festival, Inside Her Head began with Abbey Gelsomina and me wrapping the structure in wire and translucent red fabric, then inviting each person to write the name of a woman writer, poet, artist, scientist, public figure and attach it to the newly formed monument.

I also circulated a totemic sound headpiece, inviting participants to step into the world of Medusa, an archetype of female power and speech, so that emotions and experiences from the feminine realm could be voiced. Through poetry, installation, and sound, the work called for that realm to be acknowledged as an equal part of human experience.

The sound installation centered on Medusa’s head, reimagined as a tribal totem and fitted with a sound system. When worn, it immersed each participant in a She-Universe of women’s creativity: a collage mixing poetry by well-known authors with works submitted by women artists who answered my open call, alongside texts from the Red Temple collective.

Art Terrorist Devi Oracle

Jana Astanov in collaboration with Heroine Bosch’s (sister of Hieronymus Bosch) Tarot Set-Me-Free foreseeing the future of your inner Kali -- seeing more than seems possible, and seeing it all at once. Guided by the archetypes of Kaliesque rebels emerging as a set of cards she takes the audience on a journey through the mutable worlds of Eros, Thanatos and Art Terrorista!

Bosch’s Tarot Deck serves as a base for Art Terrorist Devi Oracle Set, the front of each card is covered by an image representing different attributes of Devi Kali. From the set of 78 cards 22 images come from Jana’s performance and photography series (projects such as Antidivine, SheUniverse, Naked Poetry Dive, Jesus Was a Woman, Flower Moon, Mias, Arctic Siren, Indriganam, She as He, IPPR, Je suis Supernova, Medusa, Infinite Yantras, Red Temple, Digital Dakini, Holy Green Witch etc). The remaining 56 cards appropriate projects by other mainly female artists whose work represent Women Rights, Change, Time, Power, Creation, Preservation, Destruction and Revolution such as: Hannah Wilke, Anna Akhmatova, Ana Mendieta, Sylvia Plath, Kathy Acker, Nan Goldin, Maya Angelou, Carolee Schneemann, Miriam Schapiro, Judy Chicago, Yoko Ono, Guerrilla Girls, Carolyn Kizer, Karen Finley, Patti Smith, Pussy Riot, Anne Waldman, Alice Walker, Susan Howe, Kembra Pfahler.