Exhibition for Chickens

Koushna Navabi
Double Wish (Bone) 2020

The title of this work refers to ‘double wishbone suspension’, a technology found in motor cars, and the practice of breaking a bird’s furcula bone and making a wish. Originally known as the ‘merry bone’, this meal-time custom goes back to the 17th century. “For Exhibition for Chickens,” Navabi says, “I thought if chickens could also make a wish with a part of their own body. When you wish on a wishbone for a backbone. And to wish for the biggest corn ever!” This corn, resembling a wheel, completes a work that “collides images of the practical, the morbid and the mad.”