What do you hope for the Assyrian Nation?
Watch this short video to see what the project is about and what we need from you!
What We Need! (Assyrian)
What We Need! (English)
The Project
Stone polishing unfired clay
Writing on polished bowl with locally gathered Rocky Mountain Bee Weed
Co-Founder:
Esther Elia is an Assyrian artist from Turlock, California, currently working on her Masters of Fine Arts in painting at the University of New Mexico. The Prayer Bowl Archive is a project conceived by the artist, and has become her thesis project to devote time to during the remainder of her program and beyond.
The project comes from a desire to exhibit contemporary Assyrian art coupled with narratives, as much of the Assyrian experience is marked by the need to educate communities about who we are, where we’re from, and where we live now. Because we are so practiced at giving snapshot accounts of our long and ever-changing history, this project seeks to collect some of those snapshots to inscribe on art objects as a more lasting communication of our more recent history.
Elia became interested in incantation bowls after they were mentioned in the Assyrian History class hosted by the Assyrian Cultural Foundation. As she researched these beautiful and significant cultural objects, she came up with the idea of using this ritualistic bowl as a vehicle to talk about the current whereabouts, languages, and general mindset of contemporary Assyrians. Incantation bowls were objects generally used for healing and protection — the writing on the bowls serving as a type of prescription to heal injury, sickness, and force away any demonic activity. Esther is naming this project “Prayer Bowls” as a reference to these early objects, but with a shift in usage.
Co-Founder:
Diana Atureta is an Assyrian artist born and raised entirely in diaspora and currently creates artwork outside of her career in business. The Prayer Bowl Archive is a project that caught the artist’s attention — it aligned with her passion for thinking big and creating impact. It has become a collaboration effort with Esther, in connecting together the Assyrian Circles language revival community to help deliver on the project’s vision.
Interested in joining a circle where you can gather in a safe space online for the option to have your prayer read, translated, transliterated, and added to the growing prayer repository? Email assyriancircles@gmail.com
As our people continue to face uncertainty, the hope for this project is that it would collect in one place the hopes, dreams, anxieties, and family stories all related to the Assyrian experience. As Esther makes bowls and transcribes the thoughts and prayers of Assyrians in the many languages we now speak and as Diana Atureta provides an ongoing structure for gathering and developing new prayers, the hope is to not only create an archive of objects, but also professionally photograph the objects to create a book that can be disseminated, that contains the participation of as many Assyrians as we can. The volume would include Assyrian names, the many countries of diaspora we now inhabit, the languages we speak, and our continued commitment to document our own history.
If this project is going to succeed, community support and participation is vital. Please help me make this dream a reality by sharing this vision and gathering prayers from your local Assyrian community!