The House of Asterion

Every nine years nine men enter the house so that I may deliver them from evil. I hear their steps or their voices in the depths of the stone galleries and I run joyfully to find them. The ceremony lasts a few minutes. They fall one after another without my having to bloody my hands. They remain where they fell and their bodies help distinguish one gallery from another. I do not know who they are, but I know that one of them prophesied, at the moment of his death, that some day my redeemer would come. Since then my loneliness does not pain me, because I know my redeemer lives and he will finally rise above the dust. If my ear could capture all the sounds of the world, I should hear his steps. I hope he will take me to a place with fewer galleries, fewer doors. What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me? - The House of Asterion, Jorge Luis Borges, 1964. (From Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings) The artist's first Estonian solo exhibition borrows its title from Jorge Luis Borges' short story of the same name, adopting its structural framework--where the identity of the narrator is only revealed at the climax--as a guiding principle. Expanding on Borges’ engagement with archetypes and labyrinthine narratives, Zody Burke weaves together sculptural reliefs, illustrations, architectural & linguistic fragments, and shifting spatial compositions to explore the collapse of linear time and the suffocating influence of inherited narratives. Through this recontextualization, the exhibition reflects on the disorienting effects of life under late capitalism - where indulgence carries inverted global consequences, individual agency is made vague within structures designed to obscure, and inherited cultural-mythic archetypes, like vestiges of fallen empires, quietly persist in the everyday. Zody Burke (b.1991, Manhattan) is an American multimedia artist and musician who is currently living and working in Tallinn, Estonia. Informed by her perspective as a New Yorker displaced by the city’s economic inaccessibility, Burke creates cyphers through sculpture and other media through which to cartograph the complexity of American identity within late capitalism, exploring how this mutable identity is refracted and transfigured through the mirror of other cultural spatiality. Often utilizing narrative structures, she is interested in interfacing world-building with geological time, and visualizing a diffusion of boundaries between distinct countries & their national mythologies by the omnipresence of what lies beneath. She recently completed her master’s thesis at the Estonian Academy of Art, which attempted to bridge sociopolitical narratives, legacies, and trajectories of industrialization between Estonia & the USA.