The List,
12/08/2004

DEREVO –
TANYA KHABAROVA:
REFLECTION

Cleansing routine

* * * * *

Giving Reflection a star rating
is like rating a live birth –
senseless and profoundly
beside the point.

What Khabarova gives is
less a performance than
an offering: an hour of truth.

In the white robes of a
high priestress, she lays
a table with ritual objects,
meticulous as an obsessive
compulsive. Her naked,
grease-painted body leaves
white smears on the floor –
traces of her fitful passage
and reflection of the passage
of every one of us through
life.

It’s her sincerity and
her vulnerability that make
this show so frightning and
so stunning.

It’s a purifying fire. You will
come out cleansed.

(Elizabeth Schwyzer)