TALES OF A PHOENIX
(ongoing)
CHASHAMA STOREFRONT GALLERY, NYC 2020
Tales of a Phoenix is a large-scale visual artwork and durational performance conceived and authored by Yana Schnitzler. The work gathers individual inscriptions from women around the world and weaves them into a single, monumental form through ritual, material, and performance.
EMPIRE OUTLETS, NYC 2024
Participants are invited to inscribe — on small pieces of fabric — thoughts, memories, or burdens they are prepared to relinquish. These individual gestures are collected by Schnitzler and stitched into an ever-growing, room-sized skirt composed of thousands of fragments. Over time, the work accumulates into a dense, architectural structure built from lived experience.
Since its inception in 2020, Tales of a Phoenix has developed across multiple public and institutional contexts, including exhibitions and durational performances in New York City, Chicago, Brooklyn, and beyond. With contributions from over sixty countries, the work reveals a consistent dynamic: private statements, once absorbed into a singular form, acquire public weight without losing their specificity.
CHASHAMA STOREFRONT GALLERY, NYC 2020
Throughout its exhibitions, Schnitzler performs the ongoing construction of the skirt in public, slowly assembling the inscriptions by hand. The process is deliberate and durational, emphasizing accumulation, labor, and restraint rather than spectacle. The skirt expands with each iteration, filling its surroundings and asserting a physical presence that reflects the scale of participation.
TIMES SQUARE, NYC 2023 - EXHIBIT & STITCHING PERFORMANCES
The project will culminate in a final ritual performance. In this concluding act, Schnitzler will wear the completed skirt as a gesture of gathering, drawing the accumulated material inward through a sustained movement-based performance. She will then step out of the garment and carry it to its burial site, where the work will be destroyed and allowed to decompose. Through this irreversible transition, the artwork moves from object to ground, from form to residue.
Tales of a Phoenix is not conceived as a therapeutic or communal exercise. It is a structured artistic system that uses beauty as an entry point and truth as its framework. Through contrast — between intimacy and scale, elegance and lived reality — the work creates meaning without resolution.
SUPPORT & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Tales of a Phoenix is made possible in part by support from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional support from Chashama, Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, Grove34, The Feminist Art Project, and other cultural partners.
IN THE PRESS:
“… a beautiful international quilted skirt expressing the transformative power of letting go …” -- UN Program Director News, WCA
“… a terrific installation, so moving and heartfelt and genuine. It's really staying with me.”
- M. Rifkin, THIS WEEK IN NEW YORK
“… very provocative… A collective work that … aims to reaffirm how the arts can unify the planet and level disparities…”
-- LEVANTE NEWS, Italy
“… [a] global feminist art project…” -- BOMB Magazine
