Human Incantation Bowl

Human Incantation Bowl is a participatory ritual-performance rooted in the artist’s long-standing research into ancient magical practices and their contemporary resonances. Drawing inspiration from incantation bowls—ritual objects used in Late Antiquity across Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities of Mesopotamia—this work explores how language, voice, and collective presence might become technologies for healing and transformation.

Traditional incantation bowls were inscribed with protective spells, often written in spirals, and buried upside-down to trap demons and ward off illness, misfortune, or spiritual harm. These texts often named personal afflictions as malevolent entities and called upon divine forces—archangels, sacred names, ancestral spirits—to counter them. The bowls represent a syncretic cosmology, a cultural patchwork where early Jewish mysticism intersects with pagan belief systems, Babylonian folk practices, and emerging theologies of protection and divine intervention.

It was the question posed in an academic essay on these bowls—“How did they work?”—that catalyzed Ree’s entire practice. This inquiry, both poetic and methodological, continues to animate the artist’s work: what is the mechanism by which ritual, naming, and collective intention affect change? How do we externalize pain in order to transmute it?

Human Incantation Bowl was first enacted during the Generation J Yiddish art retreat in Germany, shortly after the artist’s relocation from Israel. The timing and setting were themselves deeply symbolic—arriving in a post-Zionist liminal space, engaging with Yiddish cultural reclamation in the very place from which it was nearly extinguished. It marked a new axis in Ree’s evolving journey: from religious orthodoxy, to nationalist ideology, to diasporic reinvention.

Building upon insights gained during Confessional, Ree recognized a recurring tension—participants often hesitate to name their demons aloud. As a gentle intervention, the artist invited participants to anonymously write down their personal “demons”—internalized fears, wounds, or patterns of self-subjugation. Each note was collected, translated into Yiddish, and redistributed to others at random.

During the ritual, approximately 25 participants formed a human spiral—a recurring motif in the artist’s work, echoing both the form of traditional spell-writing and broader spiritual cosmologies. The participants thus became a living incantation bowl: a collective vessel for transmutation. One by one, each person spoke the name of a demon aloud while spiraling inward, and the name of its countering angel while spiraling outward. This choreography enacted a simultaneous descent and ascent—into darkness and toward release.

Two iterations of the ritual were performed: one focused on personal demons and angels, the other on collective ones. The anonymity allowed participants to witness their own pain held and spoken by another, collapsing the divide between individual and communal healing. This culminated in an unscripted vocal release—beginning as a hum and building into a scream—an ecstatic gesture of liberation, sonic rupture, and ancestral echo.

In the context of post-memory and diasporic revival, Human Incantation Bowl becomes a subversive reclamation of ancestral technologies. Grandchildren of Jewish survivors gathered in contemporary Germany, not to reenact tradition, but to radically inhabit it anew. The work foregrounds ritual as a dynamic, living form—capable of evolving, queerly and collectively, beyond the boundaries of institutional religion or nationalist ideology.

By focalizing and giving voice to pain, the work suggests that healing personal trauma at its source may also ripple backward and outward—soothing ancestral wounds that live on in the nervous system, and breaking cycles of intergenerational harm. In this way, Human Incantation Bowl proposes a sacred architecture of mutual witnessing, where tending to the self becomes an act of collective repair, and shared spellwork becomes a portal to transhistorical healing.