Azza El Siddique. Echoes to Omega.

A long cellar, six statues

Echoes to Omega opened at the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh's museum of installation art, on 9 August 2024 and ran until 14 September 2025. More than a year. That matters, because this work changes over time.

The room is a narrow, elongated cellar. Visitors walk on steel mesh flooring between open steel frames, like a raised walkway. Water lies below and on both sides.

Along the sides, six clay busts stand in two rows of three, submerged to the chest in oxidised water. The water is rust coloured, and over time the rust seeps into the clay. The Brooklyn Rail reviewer visited in December and already saw stains spreading across the statues.

A pump and drip irrigation system keep the water moving. It evaporates, condenses, falls. The room is a closed cycle, like a very slow rain.

Lady Sennuwy

The six statues are copies of an ancient one: Lady Sennuwy, an Egyptian noblewoman, carved about four thousand years ago. The original was found in 1913 in Sudan, weighs about a tonne, and now belongs to the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

El Siddique did not model the copies by hand. She used a 3D scan of the original and had the busts milled robotically from clay. An ancient form passes through digital technology and returns to earth.

This matters to her subject. El Siddique was born in Khartoum, Sudan, migrated to Canada and then the United States, and lives in New Haven. The Sennuwy statue is a migrant too: made in Egypt, buried in Sudan, dug up, shipped to Boston. Statue and artist share a story of lands that are no longer home.

On either side of the altar at the end of the room, two monitors show excerpts from the Amduat, an ancient Egyptian funerary text whose name means what is in the underworld. It follows the sun through the twelve hours of night before it rises again.

Sandaliya on a heated plate

At the end of the room stands an altar. A small fountain drips water mixed with Sandaliya oil onto a metal plate warmed by an industrial heating pad. Each drop falls, heats, evaporates. The smell spreads.

Sandaliya is a scented oil used in Sudanese Muslim burial rites. It is warm and woody. It is used in farewells, as a last act of care for the dead.

Visitors usually notice the smell before they know what it is. Entering a cold, damp cellar, they meet something warm and soft that does not belong there. Walking the steel path between the submerged statues, they reach its source.

The smell makes the rite real. The Amduat on screen is an old, distant text. The Sandaliya is here, entering the visitor's lungs, as it has entered the air of mourning houses in Khartoum.

Everything is changing state

El Siddique works with transformation: life into death, death into rebirth, solid into liquid, liquid into vapour. Her tools range from ancient texts such as the Book of the Dead to artificial intelligence. In 2025 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

In Echoes to Omega, every material is changing form. Water evaporates. Steel rusts. Clay stains. Oil vanishes into air. Nothing stands still, which is why the work looks different depending on the month of the visit.

The Brooklyn Rail review reads the work through migration, decay and renewal, mortality, ancestral memory, the fall of empires. Sennuwy belonged to a dynasty long gone. Her copy slowly rusts in an American cellar. Yet Sandaliya is still used today, at real funerals.

In the same years, Jonathan Baldock placed funerary herbs in ceramic vessels for Grave Goods. The two works are very different, but both hold that smell is how the living walk the last stretch with the dead.