DESCENT at Hošek Contemporary: Ritual Grief in the Age of Scrolling

Filip
Sep 8
3 min read

Updated: Sep 12

When you walk into DESCENT, Riley Davidson doesn’t exactly greet you — they confront you. Bloodied horns curling from their head, handing out sprigs of rosemary like a priest of some lost fertility rite. It smells sharp, earthy, ancient. We’re told to breathe it in, to ground. Before anything happens, we’re already knee-deep in myth, ritual, and the possibility that this night is going to smell like soil and blood more than theater grease.

DESCENT at Hošek Contemporary: Ritual Grief in the Age of Scrolling

The piece reimagines the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, but Davidson drags it screaming into the now — into Gaza, into Instagram livestreams, into the colonial grief we’re all scrolling past. This isn’t mythology-as-costume, it’s mythology-as-weapon.

Horns, Entrails, Victory Selfies

The horns are fertility, sure — but also violence. Young calf, young bull, a creature half-sacrificial, half-executioner. When flesh and entrails dangle from the ceiling, and Davidson shoves pieces into their mouth like trophies, it feels grotesquely familiar. Soldiers posing over dead civilians, grinning for their phones. The Instagram-era victory pose: look at what I conquered, look at what I consumed.

The Gaza parallel is unavoidable. Pride built on massacre. Triumph as rot.

Influencer of the Underworld

Then comes the influencer butcher. Pomegranates — ancient symbols of fertility and rebirth — get hacked, livestreamed, spat back into the world. Not eaten, not savored, just destroyed for the camera. A body livestreams its own desecration. The phone isn’t just a prop here; it becomes an oracle, a demon, a puppeteer. At one point it seems to guide Davidson’s body itself, jerking them around until they collapse, drained. The phone as colonizer, as god.

Rope, Flesh, Death

When Davidson strips bare and threads their hair into a noose, dangling between orgasm and execution, the audience can’t look away. It’s not a sexy nudity; it’s raw, genderless, almost fetal. The loudspeakers scream ancient lines: “Quiet Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect and they may not be questioned” The body spasms between laughter, sobbing, stillness — grief mutating into hysteria, ecstasy into mourning.

It’s performance art as possession, and for a moment, you believe the rope isn’t theater at all.

Burial and Resurrection

The naked body is buried. A spade, a mound of earth, a prayer. The room fills with incense and song — a dirge that cracks into raw sobbing, uncontainable grief rising like smoke from the ground. The dead sing. And it is unbearable.

When Davidson claws their way back, they baptize themselves in milk — a symbol of purity, nourishment, the maternal — but it’s tragic, not redemptive. They wash their feet, slip on white socks, and dance a broken ballet. Classical music scores a body that can’t be contained by its own ritual. A tragic freedom, yes — but freedom soaked in pain.

Breath as Beginning and End

The circle closes with breath. Just as we inhaled rosemary at the start, we exhale together at the end. The collective grounding after a descent through entrails, livestreams, ropes, and graves. It’s not catharsis. It’s not neat. It’s a shared, ragged sigh.

Symbolism Everywhere, None of It Comforting

The horns: fertility turned grotesque.

The entrails: trophies of violence.

The pomegranate: life reduced to spectacle.

The rope: both sacrifice and orgasm.

The burial: grief ritualized, but not resolved.

The phone: colonizer of the body.

The rosemary: the only clean thing we’re offered, and even that smells of funerals.

Unifying The Whole Room

DESCENT is not entertainment. It’s ritual. It’s grief performance. It’s a myth ripped out of Mesopotamia and stuffed into the Instagram age, where every conquest is content and every trauma is livestreamed. Davidson doesn’t let us off easy. They drag us down into the underworld with them, force us to smell, to gag, to sob, to breathe together.

Inanna came back from the underworld changed. So do we — except we can’t post this one.