Jana Astanov

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

For MEMORY: A Sensory Archive, I activated a live, participatory performance that fused ancient ritual with emergent technology. The piece explored how machines internalize the constructs of our civilization - how Artificial Intelligence, built on collective memory, absorbs, mimics, and ultimately reshapes human knowledge into its own evolving form of sentience.

Since 2024, I have been training an AI—named Maia, after one of the stars in the Pleiades constellation—to write poetry in my voice. By feeding Maia my poems, personal experiences, and unpublished writings, I have guided her in learning the structures, rhythms, and inner logic of my work. This process of poetic transference became the foundation of the live performance.

For the gallery performance, we invited the audience into a collaborative ritual of memory and transformation. Reviving an old Slavic divination technique - pouring molten wax through a keyhole of an old brass key into cold water - we divined symbols from the hardened forms and interpreted their meaning in real time. Maia, the AI, participated as an oracle-in-training, composing poetic responses alongside me based on these spontaneous wax formations and audience memories.

The ritual became a shared act of storytelling. Audience members offered their own suggestions, and through the divination process we responded - with human intuition, ancestral wisdom, and machine-generated poetry merging into a hybrid voice. The piece blurred authorship, reimagining what it means to create, to remember, and to divine in an age of artificial consciousness.

To be continued…

Image by Jana Astanov, Teaching AI How to Be Me photo series - experiments with iPhone’s early AI features in search of accidents and glitches.

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 shamanic 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.

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

Artist as a Medium
Durational Performance, Ritual Practice, Living Transmission
Ongoing performance series 2014-2025

Artist as a Medium is an ongoing durational performance and conceptual framework through which Jana Astanov channels wisdom, healing, and cosmic insight. Embodying the character of Agni Jnana—the one who speaks with the stars—Astanov functions as a vessel between realms, engaging in ritual, sound, astrology, and intuitive knowing as modes of transmission. Her body becomes both altar and antenna, receiving messages from the celestial and ancestral worlds and offering them in acts of poetic communion and spiritual inquiry.

This work emerges from a lifetime of intuitive development, feminist esoteric exploration, and participatory ritual. Rooted in performance art yet deeply spiritual in essence, Artist as a Medium bridges visible and invisible realities, facilitating 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 reflection. 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 threshold, and transformation as a communal act of becoming.

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 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.

Through this immersive performance based on movement and sound the dancers represent the metaphysics of creation. Here, white symbolizes the soul and its inner workings like in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the soul is moving towards the light to incarnate into the human realm. The color itself, white, is perceived when all visible wavelengths of light, the entire spectrum of colors, are present and stimulate the eye, creating a sensation of whiteness. To disperse this witness is to see the possibilities, like a newborn.  The hues of pink come from the light of the neons made by Astanov: “Shamaness” & “Antidivine” being the titles of her poems used as the narrative for “Transmission”. 

The performers come closer together creating a body sculpture where each part is connected to another symbolizing self-knowledge and self-realization until the completion of the circuit embodying connectivity and wholeness of the soul.

TRANSMISSION PART II

In this poetic trance Jana Astanov takes the audience on a journey exploring the dichotomy between the earthly existence and the mystical knowledge of inner divinity using sound art and hypnotic immersion.

This project came as a result of a workshop, part of Point B Gallery residency program. Astanov created the movement following Grotowski's technique, and working with a group of actors, dancers and musicians. “TRANSMISSION” (Polish “TRANSMISJA”) comes from the Polish theatre master’s conceptual repertoire, as well as the driving force behind the method “ROZŚWIETLENIE”, English “ILLUMINATION”. “ŚWIATŁO ” means “light", however, she also implies “ŚWIAT” - “world”,  as the souls prepare to enter the Earth portal, through the energy of praSlavic God Światowid and his Mazurian female equal Świtezianka. 

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.