TALES OF A PHOENIX
2020-ongoing
Tales of a Phoenix is a large-scale visual artwork and durational performance by Yana Schnitzler.
The work unfolds as a living system of transformation, gathering individual inscriptions from women around the world and weaving them into a continuously evolving structure through ritual, craft, and performance.
Empire Outlets NYC 2024
Participants are invited to write freely—on small pieces of fabric—thoughts, memories, or things they wish to release. These fragments are then collected and hand-stitched into a growing, room-sized skirt composed of thousands of individual contributions. Over time, the work becomes a dense, architectural form built from lived experience—at once intimate in origin and monumental in presence.
What begins as a private gesture gradually shifts into a shared field. Individual voices remain distinct, yet begin to exist in relation to one another—forming a collective body shaped through accumulation, attention, and time.
Empire Outlets, NYC 2024
Since its beginning in 2020, Tales of a Phoenix has evolved across exhibitions and live performances in New York, Chicago, Brooklyn, and beyond, with contributions from over sixty countries.
Each iteration extends the work rather than replaces it, allowing meaning to build gradually through layers of participation and material memory.
The Art Center Highland Park, Chicago 2022
In public presentations, Schnitzler continues the slow, hand-stitched construction of the skirt as a durational act. The process is deliberate and physical, emphasizing care, repetition, and presence.
Rather than functioning as spectacle, the work unfolds through time, shaping the environment around it and inviting a slower, more attentive mode of looking.
Times Square 42nd Street, NYC 2023
The project will culminate in a final ritual performance centered on transformation and renewal. In this concluding act, Schnitzler will wear the skirt as a gathering gesture, carrying the accumulated presence of thousands of inscriptions through movement before bringing it to a burial site.
There, it returns to the earth and decomposes naturally. In its place, a tree is planted as a gesture of transformation and renewal.
Like the phoenix itself, the work does not end in disappearance, but in metamorphosis—one form dissolving so another can emerge.
Through this final transition, Tales of a Phoenix completes a cycle of transformation: creation, accumulation, embodiment, and return into life.
Tales of a Phoenix is a structured artistic system that begins with beauty as an entry point and works through lived experience as material.
Moving between intimacy and scale, refinement and raw presence, it creates meaning that remains open, unfolding rather than resolved.
Alongside its material form, the project is also expanding into sensory and atmospheric research—exploring how gestures of release and memory register beyond language, and how participation continues after the moment of inscription.
These traces do not end at the site; they extend outward, carried into daily life as a subtle, ongoing resonance.
