Luminous Colony by ASTRAL00P
part of a group show LightShow curated by Norma Homberg, January 8-31, 2026, LIC Factory, NYC, USA.
Luminous Colony is a spatial installation activated through live performance and shaped by light, geometry, ritual, and collaborative authorship. Created as part of ASTRAL00P, the ongoing collaboration between artist Jana Astanov and light designer Nikolas van Egten, the work unfolds as a perceptual environment rather than a fixed object, inviting viewers into a shared field of presence structured by celestial alignment and subtle spatial markers.
The installation brings together multiple elements: video presented on a 1990s television, a sky wall projection, watercolor wallpaper illuminated by light, and a metal print from Seven Sisters, a performance for camera created on the Full Moon in alignment with the Pleiades. These components form a layered environment in which analog media, light, and celestial reference points coexist, creating a temporal and cosmological atmosphere.
The space was initially activated through a live performance that traced the geometry of the Winter Hexagon, a seasonal asterism visible in the northern sky. Using light, minimal movement, and a set of wooden sticks, the performance marked the positions of the six stars within the architectural space of the gallery, translating a celestial structure into a lived, embodied configuration.
After the performance, the sticks remained in place and became part of the installation. Arranged on the floor, they form a hexagon at the center of the space, functioning both as a diagram and as the residue of the performed action. Each point of the hexagon corresponds to one of the Winter Hexagon stars and is accompanied by a printed invocation, extending the performance into a durational, contemplative form.
In this way, Luminous Colony carries the memory of the body and the collaborative activation that shaped it. Light circulates through the environment as a relational medium, reinforcing the sense of a living system rather than a static display. The work bridges performance and installation by allowing ritual action, celestial geometry, and mediated light to organize space, inviting viewers to enter a configuration where embodied gesture, technological systems, and collective presence briefly align.
ASTRAL00P brings together performance artist and poet Jana Astanov with light designer and experimental musician Nikolas van Egten. The duo merges dark electronica, poetic incantation, and sculptural light into sensorial environments that unfold like shifting constellations. Each activation becomes a temporary portal, inviting audiences into luminous reverie.
The Living — Performance-led Installation
Art is alchemy: elements meet, transform, and only come alive in practice.
The Living is an installation that invites performance - yours. It is incomplete until the room is breathed into, until bodies listen, voices answer, and stories are shared around a digital fire.
I built a living room that remembers my childhood in Poland: mountain-view wallpaper, monitors pulsing with old-new lore and folding it into the landscape of the Shawangunks my six-year-old now calls home. This domestic stage meets the original ground of Lenapehoking (Kuwehoki, land of the pine trees). A pyre becomes a screen, a hearth becomes code: a place to gather, and to witness.
The space is scored for participation. You enter, sit or lie down, and listen to a guided trance as BaSla (Baltic & Slavic animal movement) and moon-timed footage (Seven Sisters under Full Moon) slow your breath to the room’s pulse. The monitors are not props, they are partners seated with us at the fire. Their images ask for call-and-response: copy a gesture, echo a word, pass a memory to the person beside you. The “fire” (digital, flickering) is a commons, where we tell each other stories, trade myth for myth, and braid Slavic fairy tales, and cosmic myths with the living lore of the land.
Material culture here is both stage and script: flowery fabrics (produced in the Global South, sold in the West, reclaimed from landfills in Ełk) carry the routes of empire into the present. We move with them, not as décor but as testimony, making economies visible through touch. Participation is politics: sitting together, listening together, speaking in turn, we practice a social body that outlasts spectacle.
The Living is a trance you make with me. It is a room that performs when you do: through breath, through story, through small gestures exchanged by the glow of a digital hearth. We are not all equal; some of us come from the edges of the Western empire. Here, we claim power through a symbolic act made real by collective presence. The work exists when you enter it, and it means what we make together.
Inside Her Head, Performance / Poetry / Installation, New York Poetry Festival, July 2015 on Governor's Island.
The piece was conceived as a participatory homage to women’s creativity: writers, poets, and artists - inviting the audience to co-create the installation.
Site-responsive by design, the performance was ultimately staged beside a local monument, temporarily transforming it into a sculpture honoring women authors and artists. Presented over two days of the poetry festival, Inside Her Head began with Abbey Gelsomina and me wrapping the structure in wire and translucent red fabric, then inviting each person to write the name of a woman writer, poet, artist, scientist, public figure and attach it to the newly formed monument.
I also circulated a totemic sound headpiece, inviting participants to step into the world of Medusa, an archetype of female power and speech, so that emotions and experiences from the feminine realm could be voiced. Through poetry, installation, and sound, the work called for that realm to be acknowledged as an equal part of human experience.
The sound installation centered on Medusa’s head, reimagined as a tribal totem and fitted with a sound system. When worn, it immersed each participant in a She-Universe of women’s creativity: a collage mixing poetry by well-known authors with works submitted by women artists who answered my open call, alongside texts from the Red Temple collective.
