Artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian presented “Angels Listening” at the 59th Venice Biennale. The interactive exhibition featured seven large-scale bronze angels staged around a silver confessional box, each figure rendered in silence with its mouth “taped” shut.

For many years the artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian has been analyzing the drifts of our hyper-technological and hyper-connected society. She presented at the 59th Venice Biennale, Angels Listening, an interactive exhibition featuring seven large-scale bronze angels staged around a silver confessional box, each figure rendered in silence with its mouth “taped” shut.

Viewers were invited to participate by relinquishing their innermost thoughts, whether repressed due to fear of judgement or sheer inability, by writing them onto pieces of ribbon, placing these ribbons into The Cathartic Box, and ringing the awakening bell, a symbol of the role of the angels as mute listeners.

At the end of each day all of the new messages were compiled onto prayer-like mats and dispersed throughout the exterior gardens for future visitors to encounter and share as a collective stream-of-consciousness.

This book shares those messages. In listening to these stories, perhaps it is people who become the angels listening.