Azza El Siddique combines both robotics and ancient Egypt in her room-size installation Echoes to Omega at the Mattress Factory. To El Siddique, those two topics aren’t as different as they might sound. The future-driven curiosity around the complex science around robotics and the history-driven awe towards the structures and texts of ancient Egypt are two sides of the same coin.
“I saw this really poignant image of Harvard archaeologists excavating Egyptian royal Lady Sennuwy’s bust from MFA Boston, which stuck with me,” she said. “I really wanted to make something with it. Then, I found an open source platform where museums put their objects available for 3D scan.”
Azza El Siddique Bends Time in Echoes to Omega
For Echoes to Omega, El Siddique, who had been working at digital fabrication studio Neoset Designs, 3D-printed six busts of Lady Sennuwy and had KUKA robots create them. She enjoyed working with those small assembly robots that often end up doing very repetitive production tasks and getting to watch them move in non-repetitive ways to sculpt the bust.
El Siddique doesn’t shy away from science or see it in opposition to her creative work. Rather, she finds ways for technology to inspire her. “What spoke to me when I started working in robotics was that it was all about potential. Similarly, ancient Egyptians believed when sculpting that with a piece of stone, the sculpted object is already in the slab of stone and you’re just letting it out,” she said. Echoes to Omega required using her skills of metal fabrication to build a steel mesh floor, irrigating a system of water drops over the bust, and finding a way to emulsify a perfume into the water. “I see myself as not just an artist, but a maker,” she said.
El Siddique doesn’t shy away from science or see it in opposition to her creative work. Rather, she finds ways for technology to inspire her.
With time, the bisque busts in Echoes to Omega change color as droplets of rusty water drip onto them. One of the most striking visuals is the long streaks of rust along the side of each sculpture. Every time you see the installation, it’s different with the passage of time. She infused the water in the room’s drip system with sandaliya, a Sudanese perfume used in an intricate burial ritual. “Part of what resonates with me about using scent in my work is that it’s silent but it also takes up space,” she said. This is also an element of what makes the mourning ritual so powerful. The scent lingers and affects you even though you can’t see it, liked a lost loved one.
Echoes to Omega is a remarkably complex work, as spacious and multi-faceted as the dark room that holds it. It plays with the senses from all angles. Your eyes adjust to the dark. Water drips from a pipe, footsteps echo across the floorboards above. The smell of sandaliya wafts through the room. You can feel the slight creak of the steel mesh that makes up the floor. Perhaps if you licked the bisque, you could taste the exhibition, but that would be ill-advised and probably result in getting escorted from the premises.
But, if Echoes to Omega had a flavor, it would be an earthy red wine that transport you to a place you’ve never been, or a rich coffee with cardamom mixed into it that somehow soothes you instead of wiring you. It’s timeless and unexpected, with ties to both history and future, science and art, and death and life.
Echoes to Omega is a show that speaks for itself
There are many lenses through which to look at Echoes to Omega, and the show doesn’t force you into any of them. The excavation of Lady Sennuwy’s bust can tie to El Siddique’s childhood, her family’s migration from Sudan to Canada. Though that biographical note is a part of its interpretation, it’s a show that speaks for itself. A video channel in the back of the room displays spells from an ancient text about the afterlife. “The ancient Egyptian view of the afterlife was so definite. They provided a sort of cheat sheet,” El Siddique said. The Book of the Dead offers literal imagery about what the Egyptians believed would happen when you died and instructions. But contemporary notions of heaven and hell are more abstract, and part of what the show speaks to is our difficulty as human beings conceptualizing death.
It was El Siddique’s first time exhibiting in Pittsburgh, and though she’s based in New Haven, she plans to come back and see the installation as it changes. The usual duration of an installation is around three months, she said, where Echoes to Omega will be up for over a year. Within that duration, the bisques will change color and weather slightly. But that’s all part of the plan. El Siddique said that “My work is linked to time, how it can unearth forgotten and unknown histories. There’s a poetics that.”
Story by Emma Riva
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