Hole*y Magic

About

Purity, healing, and cleansing are common themes in New Age magical practice. Tarot readers leave their decks overnight by a quartz crystal and astrologers light white candles under the full moon to purify their energies. Sorcerers who open portals to the spirit world seal them tight with salt circles to keep ‚shadow energy’ at bay. These rituals necessarily keep out the tainted, sick, or dirty: impurity becomes a threat to be warded off.

This threat, which resonates well beyond the magical, is often found in passageways: open holes where contaminants can trickle in our leak out, and whose perimeters must then be diligently guarded. Controlling and patrolling holes in the name of cleanliness can be a personal task, such as our body’s orifices, or a social one, such as our border entry points.

These controls can be dangerous for those categorized by dominant society as being in need of purification. Activists and theorists from marginalised social positions have long subverted purity politics by reclaiming social markers of dirtiness. ‚Dirty‘ concepts like smut, obscenity, or perversion have been embraced as signs of belonging and joy, especially in queer subcultures through actions such as kiss-ins or the celebration of trashy fashion.

As contemporary culture proliferates across for-profit digital platforms, ideals of purity or authenticity become further distorted. TikTok witches, like street fortune tellers, are often associated with ripoffs and scams. These perceptions of trustworthiness, whether online or off, tend to fall along familiar lines of race, gender, and class.

The artists in HOLE*Y MAGIC poke holes in the holier-than-thou attitudes sometimes encountered in New Age and ‚western esoteric‘ magical practice. They challenge the inherently Eurocentric and appropriative nature of these categories themselves, recognizing and rejecting the colonial legacy of moralistic puritanism from which magical traditions are not exempt.

Agustín, Costa, Maggic, and Youden’s installed artworks employ magic along with queer strategies of irreverence, messiness, and drama to tease out the relationships between magic and our political, technological, and economic realities. All the while, whether through the cracks in the pavement or the cracks in our cell phone screens, their artworks offer moments of deep connection to spirit and nature, to the shadow and the light.