#egyptia

[honeykinney]

Every passing day that Gabby had to stay at the Savage Land Sanctuary, the harder it got to take a full breath of air. The sand surely didn’t help, but she knew that it wasn’t an air quality issue. The guilt of each day passing where Laura had to continue to be a Horsemen was crushing, and Gabby hadn’t processed the tears streaming down her face until she heard a voice. Quickly wiping the side of her face, she stood taller and cleared her throat. “What was that?”

[bandagedknight]

“While that sounds just.. lovely, really, I’m actually on a bit of a mission here. I was hoping to get pointed in the direction of Sheriff Strange.” Or Marc Spector. Layla El-Faouly would be great too. But asking around for those names would probably get Steven killed if he wasn’t careful. 

[babyphoeniix]

Rachel laid tirelessly on the ground at the Savage Land Sanctuary, her collar still tightly restricted around her neck along with the new restraints the refugees were keeping her in as her head perked up at the sound of the door opening. Her telepathy was neutralized by something one of them had injected her with, but the threat left her mouth anyways. “Come any closer to me and I’ll fry your brain.”

[brooklynmuseum]

Visual artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi visited the galleries and reserves of the Brooklyn Museum this summer during her 2018 tenure as a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow. Her research on botanicals and historic hair-based art will inform upcoming projects in the US and Nigeria. Here, she reflects on her experience at the Museum. 

Untidy hems can unnerve me, especially if there is any contrast between the thread and fabric. I look at things closely—from hairs of brush strokes to gradients within pencil marks. I'm usually searching for repeated shapes, techniques, and patterns. Through similar objects, I connect my studio practice to my life. So doing, I link seemingly disparate works. And in the process, I welcome the opportunity to confront boundaries of time and place. These often structure academia and guide institutions.

My Brooklyn Museum visit began in the Egyptian collection. The texture of braided human hair extensions carbon dated to ca. 2114-1502 B.C.E. took me to two memories. The first was Halloween, over two decades ago, when I dressed up as Cleopatra. I sported (awful) thick eyeliner and synthetic, braided hair extensions. A stylist melted their ends to hold the strands together. The Egyptian extensions also reminded me of today’s crocheted, braided attachments. Someone was smart for coming up with those. Or was the inventor smart enough to bring back something Egyptian?

I looked at several nineteenth-century Lei Niho Palaoa Hawaiian necklaces of human hair. And I recall Victorian Hair work, a concurrent craft with molded human hair. And I remember my Hawaiian neighbor across the street. Her hair touched the ground as she walked. Then, there is the numb feeling in my neck, when I was 19 years old. A young boy in Ibadan, Nigeria added what felt like 1 million braids of synthetic extensions to my hair. Those extensions were uniform, like the Lei Niho Palaoa, and a pain to take out.

Next is the Coastal Wari wig headdress from present-day Peru. The wig dates to 600-1000 C.E.—and talk about something being in pristine condition! Its cotton fibers wrapped around human hair remind me, again, of Victorian Hair work. The technique is also in threading hairstyles that were once popular in Nigeria. I have been building a relationship between the two. Stacked colored threads in the headdress, are against the chocolate brown hair. It evokes friendship bracelets that I made when I was much younger. I'd tape colored thread to brown, faux leather seats in the yellow school buses that took me to and from school.

Then there is the Karamojong mudpack coiffure. At once it is a fabulous headdress, a sculpture, and a cluster of July 4th fireworks. It is also the collection of lichens from Jamaica that I studied this summer in Washington, D.C. . I remember of Somi. She is my dear New York-based, Ugandan and Rwandan friend. How transnational can a life today be? She just left Lagos. And here, in Brooklyn, I’m looking at something collected in Uganda, and now housed in New York.

With these observations, I try to think about what I see because of what I’ve seen. The challenge is to free myself of my biased views. I seek to do this by embracing tangents to build new, untidy narratives. These aim to highlight a willingness to celebrate different contexts. This matters, especially today when divide, ignorance and intolerance are trending.

Posted by Temitayo Ogunbiyi

[mohamedsaadart]

Ra the sun god something i painted yesterday  http://fav.me/dcdac9b

[bellydancevids]

Zahra Zuhair

[bandagedknight]

@scrletscarab​

Sinister Labs carried a reputation across Egyptia that even Marc-- fragmented memories and all -- knew could only be described as sadistic. He’d heard horror stories from Gabby in his tenure at the Summer’s Camp before his memories from the world before Battleworld had flooded him. 

It was definitely the worst case scenario, getting brought there. His status as a former Avatar had cemented his fate when Famine had caught him, and he hadn’t been quick enough to evade her dust or life draining abilities. She’d definitely lived up to her name, because there was a second back there where he’d been convinced that she wasn’t going to be able to stop herself from sucking every last bit of energy he had in him. After she’d gotten her hands on him his brain had gotten so hazy that he barely made out what happened next.

Pestilence had scolded her, saying something about Baron Apocalypse needing him alive and minimally injured, and then he’d blacked out. When he came to, he was being dragged down a dark hallway, a constricting device wrapped around his neck as his legs drug underneath him, still not able to support his own weight. 

His body slumped to the ground as rough hands shoved him into a locked cell, the ground cold against his skin as he laid there for a few moments and tried to regain his bearings. 

Suit. Armor. Fuck. 

It wasn’t working. Of course it wasn’t working. No doubt because of the collar that was one notch away from constricting his airway altogether. Delayed eyes scanned the room, already searching for a way out when they landed on another body across the room from him. Using every ounce of his arm strength to drag himself over to get a better look, and then he spotted familiar black curls and it felt like the world around him stopped and all of the air left his lungs. 

“Layla, oh God..” He choked out, not able to keep his eyes from filling with hot tears as he instinctively cupped her face and kissed her. She looked more than worse for wear, but he hadn’t seen her since before the Incursion and his brain hadn’t even caught up to the fact that she wouldn’t know who he was here.

[bandagedknight]

@mgwynns​

This was bad-- This was really, really fucking bad.

Marc hadn’t expected any of this to be easy by any means, but he’d hoped he could at least make it back to the Summer’s Camp back in one piece to relay what little information he had back to Scott. Now, he was sprinting through the Badlands, shoving people and objects alike to the side as he ducked under clotheslines and prayed that Famine had lost his tail. 

He knew better than that, but if his work as a mercenary taught him anything it was to never interrupt a chase to check your six. All it did was slow you down. But he was quickly eating his own advice, because what he didn’t anticipate were her fucking wings.

Famine was faster than she looked, and pretty soon he skidded to a stop on the sand and took a few large steps back, his hands up in a defensive position. “God, really? That’s basically cheating.” He quipped, out of breath at this point but holding off on summoning the suit. 

The magic was weaker here without the physical presence of Khonshu, and the last thing Marc needed was to draw more attention to the fact that he was an Avatar or more people might join in on this hunt.