InVocation is an immersive sculptural installation in hand-woven hemp and jute rope. A curtain-like monument, it divides space the way a backstage curtain divides a theater — one world visible, one world just out of reach. Visitors are invited to enter, to touch the rope and the objects woven into it, to smell the hemp and jute, to read the books and personal writings held within. Tactility and scent are not incidental — they are central to the work.
Woven throughout the rope are personal objects donated by current and former sex workers — everyday, intimate things that accompanied real people through their working lives, sent specifically to be held inside this piece. They are not props or symbols chosen by the artist. They are memory made material.
The rope moves between worlds: the same material used in theater rigging and in Shibari, the Japanese erotic pleasure craft at the center of Midori's decades of teaching and writing. That convergence is intentional — blurring the boundary between sacred and profane, labor and ritual, the seen and the hidden.
InVocation draws on Japanese memorial ceremonies in which worn tools — broken needles, spent combs — are honored and released rather than discarded. Here, the donated objects have been similarly retired: released by the people who carried them, woven into a collective monument, transformed into what the artist calls a moment of labor. Part shrine, part dressing room, part invocation — the work is a call to witness histories too often hidden, dismissed, or erased.
InVocation: North America Originally commissioned by the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York, in 2018, the American iteration of InVocation carries objects contributed by sex workers in the United States and United Kingdom. Its exhibitions have included the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York), the Sex Workers' Pop-Up in conjunction with the UN Commission on the Status of Women (New York, 2020), Root Division (San Francisco), and the Handwerker Gallery (Ithaca, New York).
InVocation: Europe In 2025, the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn commissioned a new and distinct European iteration of InVocation, incorporating objects contributed specifically by sex workers across Europe. Presented as part of Sex Work — A Cultural History, this version marks the work's first major European museum presentation and its first body of European contributors — a new chapter in an evolving collective memorial.
