PERFORMANCE & RITUAL

2011-present

These works treat performance as sets of activations, where bodies, materials, and environments are brought into relation. Spanning durational actions, staged interventions, and installations of video performance with artifacts, they engage ritual practice, feminist technoscience, invisible agents/ illusory effects, and computational systems, where the 'laboratory' becomes a space of embodied enactment. Many of these performances centre feminist erotic pleasure and reproductive technologies, utilizing the power of taboo materials to trouble normative boundaries around the body, intimacy, and reproduction.

Overview of performance and ritual works by WhiteFeather Hunter, including live performances, video works, ritual actions.

HEXY LAB

HEXY LAB is a live bioart ritual and performance installation that premiered at Grace Exhibition Space, NYC. The work reconfigures the laboratory as ritual circle: a site of embodied, technofeminist enactment, integrating biological materials, sound, illusion technologies, and participatory action. Structured through a sequence of participatory ritualized procedures and experimental gestures, it triggers taboo, utilizes eroticism as technology, and engages sensory exchange to activate the body as a conduit for magic and electronics.

Homunculariums

The Homunculariums are a series of ritualized bioart performances that engage speculative processes of generation, incubation, and transformation. Drawing on alchemical histories of the homunculus alongside feminist technoscience, these works reframe the laboratory as a site for producing alternative forms of life and relation. Enacted through communal procedures and symbolic apparatuses, the Homunculariums function as experimental ground in which biological, mythological, and technological aspects intersect.

PALIMPSEST

Palimpsest is a video textile work that engages with historical demonology texts from the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic to examine intersections of witchcraft, gender, and biomedical epistemology. The silk surface bears photochemical transfers of the original pages—“ghost pages” interlaced with embroidery and embedded botanicals. The video alternates between these spectral inscriptions and sequences of the artist creating the work within the Boscastle landscape, returning the act of making onto the textile to produce recursive gestures where memory and material are continuously rewritten.

Micro-rituals and Erotic Encounters

These early works engage performance as small-scale interventions, installations, and hybrid objects. Situated across public and semi-public contexts including nightlife venues, storefronts, and constructed environments, they stage encounters structured by proximity, fixation, and desire. Operating as micro-rituals, these works mobilize gesture, repetition, and embodied presence to produce moments of erotic tension and affective exchange.

Collaborative and Directed Performances

These works include a selection of performances conceived and directed by other artists, in which WhiteFeather participated as a performer, extending her practice through contributions within broader performance art networks. Operating within externally defined structures, these performances involve the execution of scores, gestures, and actions that mediate the body through technological, prosthetic, and collective conditions.