Mouth full of Spirits by Ron Athey and Carmina Escobar
Commissioned for the Speaking in Tongues exhibition, Mouth Full of Spirits is a live vocal ritual by Ron Athey and Carmina Escobar that unfolds through glossolalia, breath, and embodied sound. At the threshold where language collapses, the performers enter a shared field of utterance in which voice detaches from meaning and becomes conduit, force, and residue. Each body holds its own opening, its own passage. In this work, sound emerges not as communication, but as visitation, fragmented, excessive, irreducible.
Ron Athey (b. 1961, Groton, Connecticut) is a Los Angeles-based artist who has been making performance works since 1981, when he and partner Rozz Williams made a series of live, sound and for-camera performances under the name Premature Ejaculation. In 1998, Athey created his first solo performance, The Solar Anus, which was presented in 25 international venues, with its final showing at the Hayward Gallery, London (2006). Subsequent commissions and performances include The Judas Cradle: An Operatic Duo Drama (2004-2006), a reclamation of the ecstatic Pentecostal voice in collaboration with soprano/musicologist Juliana Snapper; the Incorruptible Flesh series, begun in 1995; Gifts of the Spirit: Prophecy, Automatism and Discernment with Sean Griffin (Cathedral of Saint Vibiana, 2018); and Willendorf with Hermes Pittakos (Tate Modern, 2025). A series of collaborations with vocalist Carmina Escobar led to Vox Clamantis (2021-2022). Video works include Hierophant (2025) and Pasiphae, Witch ...
Carmina Escobar (b. 1981, Mexico City) is a Los Angeles–based extreme vocalist and intermedia artist whose work treats the voice as a site of ritual, rupture, and transformation. Rooted in migration and liminal states, she moves across performance, installation, and film to push language beyond meaning, into breath, vibration, and embodied presence.
Her work has been presented internationally at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Broad, REDCAT, The Kitchen, CTM Festival, and Fábrica de Arte Cubano, with film scores featured at the Sundance Film Festival. A recipient of the Creative Capital Award (2026) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artist Award in Music/Sound (2020), Escobar’s practice resonates with Speaking in Tongues as an invocation, where voice becomes a conduit between body, spirit, and the untranslatable.
