Death and Renewal in Tau Lewis’s Performance

‘I fancy myself something of a magician,’ the artist Tau Lewis tells me over Zoom in late August. Her monumental soft sculptures – often figures or heads stitched together from found fabrics and other materials – do what magicians’ charms do best: turn the ordinary into the spectacular, tricking us into believing that something supernatural, even divine, is at work. Just as her sculptures embody this incantatory quality, so do her words. In an interview with her mentor, the fellow self-taught artist Lonnie Holley, printed in the catalogue for her solo exhibition ‘Spirit Level’ (2024–25) at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, she describes the importance of music to her life: ‘I can’t exist without it, I can’t work without it, I can’t dream without it, and so I wonder if the territory of sound is somewhere that I’ll go eventually.’ That ‘eventually’ has now arrived. This month, Lewis will unveil her first performance, No one ascends from the underworld unmarked (2025), at the Performa Biennial in New York. According to the press release, the production – curated by Kathy Noble – will take place at the storied Harlem Parish, ‘interweaving sculpture and scenography with live music and movement’ in a dazzling adaptation of the Sumerian poem ‘The Descent of Inanna into the Underworld’ (c.1900–1600 BCE), from which the performance’s title is drawn.

In the original myth, Inanna, the Sumerian queen of heaven, descends to the underworld to visit her sister, Ereshkigal, who presides over the land of the dead. Upon Inanna’s arrival at her sister’s palace, Ereshkigal ‘fastens the eye of death’ on her and hangs her corpse from a hook. After three days, Inanna is resuscitated at the behest of Enki, the Sumerian god of water and wisdom, and ascends to earth. Lewis first encountered the work, which serves as a potent allegory for rebirth and spiritual growth, in a bereavement group after the passing of her mother in 2022. ‘A lot of what I do is about transformation, renewal and death,’ she says, noting how the text – which is ‘about moving through a painful experience, rather than over or around it’ – has ‘touched a lot of what I’ve done since I read it’. She now carries an illustrated copy of the poem with her everywhere like an amulet.

There’s a huge transference of energy that you give to an object when you spend so much time physically with it. Tau Lewis

Based in Brooklyn and raised in Toronto to Jamaican parents, Lewis has articulated the central commitment of her practice as being to ‘honour and continue diasporic practices of art making, which have been […] focused on recycling and burning their own energy onto the object’, as she explained to Hans Ulrich Obrist in a 2021 interview for Mousse. Her work is typically fashioned by hand from multiple materials: used textiles and clothing, leather and plaster, as well as stones, seashells, sea glass and other artefacts. We call the resulting forms sculptures, but such a framing belies the density of potential energy they possess. They are sculptures, yes, but they are totems, too. In Symphony (2020–21), which Lewis assembled while listening exclusively to the album Fountain (2020) by Lyra Pramuk (who has composed the score for No one ascends), an anthropomorphic being – constructed from recycled and hand-dyed fabrics, leather, cotton batting and beads – appears with arms outstretched and palms turned upwards in a reverential posture. Garlands of beige, dusty pink and pastel yellow flowers cascade around the towering figure and down its bell-shaped, intricately layered skirt, exemplifying the atmosphere of sanctuary that is emblematic of Lewis’s oeuvre.

To this end, it is Lewis’s other primary materials – time and touch – that confer on her works their charge and talismanic quality. Across days, weeks and months, Lewis interacts with the composite parts that will later make up each artwork as they aggregate in her studio. ‘I need to spend time close to them,’ she says of her materials, as if speaking of a loved one. ‘There’s a huge transference of energy that you give to an object when you spend so much time physically with it. Mostly I love to filter the world through touch. I think that’s why I love sewing and building things by hand.’

No one ascends serves as an opportunity to enact ‘a somatic expansion of the physical works’, Lewis tells me, adding: ‘I want this to change the way I work.’ Noble too hopes that ‘what we’re making [for Performa] will help [Lewis] jump off into whatever grandiose things she wants to do next, because through this she’s learning all these different languages of making.’ In developing the performance alongside Lewis, Noble has been ‘thinking about figures like Octavia E. Butler’ and her ‘speculative worlds’, and sees Lewis’s practice as engaging with contexts other than just visual art. Noble situates the performance as a sort of ‘hand-crafted science fiction’, an idea that widens the referential aperture through which we might interpret No one ascends, as well as Lewis’s broader practice.

Lewis also cites the traditions of other autodidacts, especially those from the American South who work with found materials, as central to her practice. Of the Gee’s Bend quilters, for instance, the artist notes that they too are ‘thinking deeply about the ghosts that are in the materials’. There is also the aforementioned Holley, whom she cites in the Obrist interview as her ‘greatest inspiration in art and life’. Since their first meeting in 2018, Holley has contributed enormously to the development of Lewis’s work. It was Holley who advised Lewis to study the work of Thornton Dial and to integrate fabric more extensively into her sculptures, something that has since become central to her visual vocabulary.

Her attention to the haptic recalls the apotheosis of Ntozake Shange’s monumental choreopoem For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1976), wherein the crescendo is ushered in by ‘a layin’ on of hands’. It is the speaker’s surrender to the redemptive touch of her sister-friends that catalyses the text’s revelatory, ecstatic and oft-cited ending: ‘the sky laid over me like a million men / i waz cold/ i waz burnin up/ a child / & endlessly weavin garments for the moon / wit my tears / i found god in myself / & i loved her/ i loved her fiercely’. Like ‘The Descent of Inanna’, Shange’s text is suffused with questions of rebirth and revival and has galvanized generations of Black women towards sincere grappling with the fullness of our pasts.

Lewis’s commitment to the slow and the hand-crafted exemplifies her affinity for methods imbued with a ritualistic register, a concern she shares with Pramuk, who, according to Lewis, ‘describes the work she makes as devotional music’. In addition to composing the performance’s score, Pramuk has also provided crucial feedback throughout Lewis’s drafting of the script, based on her fluency in ‘The Descent of Inanna’’s robust symbolism. In addition to her musical practice, Pramuk is also an astrologer and regards Inanna’s descent as an allegory for Venus’s retrograde path, which brings with it an opportunity to explore the hidden or neglected aspects of our selves. As Lewis puts it, it is a chance to ask ‘if we are willing to do that underworld journey and address what we’re not acknowledging because it’s too sticky, too painful. If we choose to go there, there’s something alchemical about it that can give you power.’

It is Lewis’s other primary materials – time and touch – that confer on her works their charge and talismanic quality. Camille Bacon

In its interpretation of ‘The Descent of Inanna’, Lewis’s performance will consider Inanna and Ereshkigal not as discrete entities, but as two halves of a shared consciousness, the former of which needs to behold and acknowledge the latter. It is only after learning to revere, as the poem puts it, the ‘dust in the underworld’ that Inanna is reborn, her ascension propelled by the integration of her other half, her shadow self. It is also significant that Enki uses dirt from under his nails – a substance considered abhorrent at worst and mundane at best – to assemble the beings that later revive Inanna. Supported by elaborate lighting and set design, the sculptures that will conjure the world of No one ascends are constructed largely from domestic fabrics like curtains, towels and blankets. Like Enki, Lewis is crafting an act of transmutation through materials that literally touch our skin and support the quotidian rituals of our lives. They are, perhaps, the ‘shadow materials’ that support our daily experience but which we leave unacknowledged, just as we do our own subconscious and our shadow selves.

For Lewis, the terrain of mythology provides a scaffold through which to confront the throb of grief: ‘I love myth; it should be treated with the same reverence as science. I rely on it to inspire and help shape my own interior world and the world that these sculptures inhabit.’ Of the performance venue, a deconsecrated church originally built in 1897, she notes: ‘I knew that [No one ascends] was going to be something of a ceremony [and have] the feeling of a ritual. And where do things like that happen? They happen in churches.’ Moreover, Harlem Parish’s acoustics will lend Pramuk’s score an operatic quality. Sensitivity to acoustics is one of Lewis’s inheritances, as her father operated a reggae bar in Toronto for much of his life, which he fitted with a sound system he built from scratch. ‘You could walk down College Street and Dundas on a Friday or Saturday night and feel the sound system from several blocks away. He’s got an affinity for sound and heavy bass. I love that that’s in me as well. It’s important to me that the acoustics in the room are really, really breathtaking.’ If the domestic items that make up the sculptures are a kind of shadow material, then bass is perhaps the shadow side of a musical composition; both will be exalted and diligently witnessed in No one ascends.

Emblematic of Lewis’s wider practice, the making of No one ascends has required the artist – supported by Noble and Pramuk, with whom she has woven a rare cradle of trust – to descend into the terrain of her own underworld. She told me, ‘I can’t believe how good I feel about it,’ suggesting that excavating one’s ghosts can yield as much ecstasy, thrill and clarity as the agony and confusion we more readily associate with grief, death and rebirth. By staging a production that casts the subconscious into the sublime, Lewis’s debut performance invites us to meet ourselves in the dark without flinching, so that we, too, might ascend – like Inanna – back to our own heavens.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘Tau Lewis’

Tau Lewis’s performance ‘No one ascends from the underworld unmarked’ will premiere as part of The Performa 2025 Biennial, New York, until 23 November

^{Main image: Tau Lewis, The Miracle (detail), 2024, steel, enamel paint, foam, acrylic paint and finisher, repurposed leather, suede, goatskin, assorted fabric, leather, fabric, natural dyes, assorted beads, gold and silk thread, coated nylon thread, coated cotton thread, 3.4 × 2.5 × 2.5 m. Courtesy: © Tau Lewis; photograph: Justin Craun}