Amy Rose Khoshbin

ANAHITA

2026
Participatory performances and sculpture series at Emily Harvey Foundation, The Tank, time + space, CATCH at the Arts Center at Governors Island. Upcoming solo exhibition at Transmitter Gallery.

ANAHITA is an evolving performance, installation, and participatory ritual that reimagines the ancient Persian goddess Anahita, associated with water, healing, fertility, and wisdom, as a framework for collective grief, transformation, and repair.

Drawing from Persian cosmology, ceremonial traditions, lived experience, and speculative world-building, ANAHITA creates immersive environments in which sculpture, performance, and social practice become inseparable. Rather than representing ritual, the work builds situations in which ritual can actually take place. Sculptural objects become tools for action, audiences become collaborators, and the installation changes through their participation.

At the center of the project are soft silicone sculptures called Cyst-M’s, forms that emerged from my experience of breast cancer and reconstructive surgery. Worn on the body, cut open, filled with slime, or created in response to conversations with participants, the Cyst-M’s give physical form to what accumulates when grief, fear, illness, memory, and inherited trauma from living in oppressive systems have nowhere to go. Their activation becomes an act of opening, release, and transformation.