Review: Soul Stake at an undisclosed warehouse in Philadelphia
What the state called degenerate, the body declares is sacred.
It’s dark out there. Upon arrival at a warehouse in Southwest Philadelphia around 7 p.m., I circle the block a few times looking for souls. It’s raining, and the smell of blossoms is mixed with gasoline. I’m a spirit of the night in a neighborhood I don’t know, approaching a building with echoes of fists hitting punching bags and chains clanging. It’s Friday, March 20, 2026, the Spring Equinox. I’d received the location address to Soul Stake a few hours before via email in exchange for my $30 ticket. A showcase of Philadelphia’s underground, DIY art community facilitated by Masina Frank and Ella Konefal, I was about to enter a piece of art historical research and intervention with the Nazi propaganda degenerate art show of 1937. This activation is one of four within a larger project and a corresponding exhibition, God’s Work, currently on view at Vox Populi through April 19, 2026.
After pacing the warehouse outside on foot, a car pulls up next to me, and two people get out. I asked if they were attending Soul Stake; they nodded. We look for the door together. Also outsiders, they’d just gotten off a bus from New York to see their friends’ piece in the show. I admired their dedication to their friends. We find the door, march two flights of stairs, and meander a series of hallways until the sound of voices begins to rise. Inside, a desk is stationed with a kind-eyed person who checks names off a list. Around the room, bustling with life, was the underground. Adhered to scrim walls wrapped in translucent heavy-duty white chiffon, hung art done by over a dozen artists from an open call.
The exhibition walls themselves were displayed with direct conceptual reference to the film The Red Shoes (1948). For The Red Shoes, the production designer, Hein Heckroth, created the film's sets using materials such as chiffon, gauze, and cellophane, a direct material echo of Soul Stake. The exhibition space becomes a sort of stage set. Further solidifying the connection between the two projects, Heckroth had been blacklisted by the Nazis for refusing to leave his Jewish wife; his aesthetics were considered degenerate. Iconic film critic, Roger Ebert, described The Red Shoes as “voluptuous in its beauty and passionate in its storytelling. You don’t watch it, you bathe in it.”1 And similarly, one must bathe in the magnificent entangled handiwork of Masina and Ella.
This project is drenched in historical investigation, but specifically with an eye for the contemporary and the cunning genius of visionary social strategists. The press release names more than thirty artist participants; Soul Stake was no small feat to organize. They share that the project concept had been “cooking for several years,” but it was set into motion about six months ago. Soul Stake’s title draws from the propaganda flyer Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge by El Lissitzky. The poster depicts a red triangle, an ancient sacred geometric form that crosses virtually every spiritual tradition. Red triangles were a mark used by the Nazis to designate political prisoners–primarily communists, socialists, trade unionists, and resistance members. Here, the red triangle pierces a white circle. Soul Stake’s triangle reclaims a shape used by the Nazis to alienate as a shape of divine power, a weapon, and collective defiance.
The Nazis had banned, censored, and mocked modernist artworks and artists, claiming they were un-German, Jewish, Communist. I think about current events. I am wary of making a direct parallel between the German fascism of the 1930s and 1940s and what is currently happening in America. Yet, there are waves of similarities worth naming, and Human Rights Watch recently released research and analysis that suggests that the Trump administration has embraced a wide range of authoritarian tactics. Recently, nearly two thousand trans individuals’ driver’s licenses were canceled and revoked overnight in Kansas. A license is a document verifying someone’s identity, like wearing a triangle to mark their difference. This legislative move now outs a trans person to every authority that checks it.2 Or I think about a group exhibition that took place in September 2025 at Pepperdine University titled Hold My Hand in Yours, which was censored and abruptly closed after the Christian university took issue with some of the works’ confrontation of the country’s current immigration policies.3 Or more broadly, the complete elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, alongside the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. This sweeping move gestures a censoring of DEI and “gender ideology” grant projects that redirect funding to “empower houses of worship” and to specifically fund events related to the nation’s 250th birthday.4
The Entartete Kunst was first held by the Nazis in Munich in 1937 and consisted of 650 modernist artworks that the Nazis had taken from museums, which were poorly hung alongside graffiti and text labels mocking the art and the artists. What was designed to inflame public opinion against modernism actually amplified it to become the most visited modern art exhibition in history at that time. The exhibition traveled to several other cities. Then, exactly 87 years ago, on March 20, 1939, the Nazis burned nearly 5,000 artworks in Berlin, also on the Spring Equinox. On the anniversary of this burning is the date Soul Stake takes place. When art becomes banned, censored, and mocked, it doesn’t disappear; it goes underground, speaks in symbols, and becomes subversive. And if it gets burned, perhaps someone channels it back to life. Each piece of art included in Soul Stake references an original work in the 1937 Degenerate show.
The Soul Stake curators intend that the works “confront generational trauma, authoritarian resurgence, and the cyclical nature of cultural repression while galvanizing Philadelphia’s artistic community.” Immediately, I notice a cross painted on the fabric wall. Yet this space felt incredibly safe, inclusive, and nonjudgmental. There are a multitude of Jesuses and crosses all clustered toward the front entrance of Soul Stake. This gesture references the curation of the original Entartete Kunst. Specifically confrontational at the time was Kruzifixus, a wood crucifix by Ludwig Gies. Created as a WWI memorial installed in Lübeck Cathedral, this sculpture had its head sawed off by vandals in 1922, was repaired and then confiscated, and was later destroyed after the Entartete Kunst closed. But what is a cross for except execution? These images of Jesus were depicted as sickly, grotesque, and weak, not the supposed Aryan ideal the Nazis were after.
From around the room, there were a few striking works I stared at for a while, for I knew no one, and they were all I had. A piece by Yianni Kourmadas titled Melancholy Woman after Melancholy Girl by Heinrich Hoerle lures me in. No more than three inches in size, tacked onto the wooden wall frame, the metal eyes are literally cold. I notice eyes similar to these in other paintings around the room. If the eyes are the way to the soul, these souls are surely distant. Melancholy Woman looked more tired than Melancholy Girl; she’s older. The original painting has an orange circle, like a moon. In Melancholy Woman, the moon transforms into a tiny megaphone. Melancholy Woman stares, without blinking, into the heart of Chaia, the electronic composer, from across the room, as if signaling her story.
Raging nearby, with similar glazed eyes, glaring at me, a painting, The Lovers, two femme bodies, arms wrapped around each other, one smokes a white pipe. The painting is by Holland Fox. Bedazzled with rhinestones, body art was stuck on top of the oil paint. One body, darker skin, striped shirt with brown spaghetti strap top, and five necklaces, almost fondling the other, serious-faced, brown-haired person with a spiral tattoo and revealing clothing. Yet, both are more modestly dressed than the original work referenced, Two Girls - Half Nudes by Otto Mueller. I wonder about the relationship of those half-nudes.
Another work, Blumengarten, one of the largest in the exhibition, arrests me. Vallyn Murphy utilizes hundreds of tulle pom poms to invoke impressionist brush strokes and color, summoning the hands of Emil Nolde, who painted the original Blumengarten. Vallyn pushes the painting through a new material world. She remarks that the work is “the joy of a beautiful garden in the process of defilement.” Within the decay, materials include paint, resin, blood, hair, polymer, maggots, sticks, dirt, and some pieces of tulle scorched from being set afire. I can’t help but think about the earth inflicted by bombs and the forever chemicals released into the air. Air has no borders, and wind has a mind of its own.
Swiftly, at 8 pm, the sonic component of the evening in the form of Chaia, a Yiddish Techno composer whose work samples archival Yiddish music, begins. A pale, dark-haired woman emerges in all white, sits upon a humble white stage with a plethora of MIDI cords sprawling. I notice IVs still taped to her arms. I wonder about this. There are both masked and unmasked people at this event. And many queer and punk bodies collide, a range of ethnicities, intergenerational. For an hour, the music undulates as the bodies multiply till the room is very crowded. I see later that Chaia also performed earlier that Friday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, amplifying this same frequency across a city bracing for a spring, summer, and fall season of high visibility as the nation confronts and wrestles with accurately telling its own story; the semiquincentennial.
Of all the static objects, The Sick at Night is a striking, collaborative piece by Brothers Sick: a brother duo, Ezra and Noah Benus. Stitched together like an L-shaped blanket, the piece calls forth Sick One in the Night by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. These brothers were the friends of the two New Yorkers I met upon arrival. Serendipity, I think not. Noah, who is introduced to me by the New Yorkers, unlocks the art and a missing piece of Soul Stake I could not yet name. He points to the black triangle in the tapestry, in reference to the symbol the Nazis placed on all chronically ill people. The fabric that acts as a frame is a medical gown. “What does it mean to be degenerate?” he asks me. The concept of time is quite different for people suffering from illness, he states. There’s a cyanotype image of an MRI of his head. Noah suffers from chronic migraines. A very large, multicolored hand is outstretched toward me. I first thought in reference to palm reading, now I know it’s asking me to hold it. At the top of the work is a half-oval beam of yellow light, whose nodes are shooting out of and throughout the work. Similar to how sound travels across a room or how history repeats itself. Time slowed down.
I realize we are not channeling spirits here per se, but the past. And if we’re channeling the past than maybe the past is a spirit. Or time itself is alive and talking. Pausing, I look up and appreciate the light. The lights are c-clamped to the pipes on the ceiling, wrapped in black paper to soften. At the transition from art viewing to the sonic fashion show-like sequence, Masina ascends a ladder. Ella holds the ladder below. Masina’s dress is a sparkling red, translucent, draped, hugging the body. Ella’s top and bottom are also translucent red. Both outfits had been designed by a friend, Jenna Robb, who also designed another wearable sculpture activated by Chloe Marie. Masina unplugs one light from the outlet in the ceiling. Mood lighting enacted. We’re then asked to wait in darkness for eight minutes as Chaia brings the artworks to life. People often say to separate art from the artist, but in the case of performance art, no one can do such magic. These artworks are breathing now, some very heavily. Like a veil, very thin, or the makeshift theatrical curtain behind Chaia’s body, the activation begins. I’ll mention a few below; there were ten in total.
A total balancing act, China Rain, emerges, Balancing Act 01, summoning Death as Juggler (Revolution), an unsettling woodcut by Christian Rohlfs. A long lumber plank poised atop China’s head, fastened with nothing but a loose screw, wobbles, one end a red candlestick unlit, the other a knife crassly tied to a taller candelabra with twine. The precarity of the moment, China’s shakiness, the weight of the world on someone’s shoulders; darkness and light. Like a scale tipping back and forth, measuring, judging the earth, weighing the severity of sin. Violence and also hope, perhaps extinguished by the length of time. After pacing slowly to the back of the room, China mounts a tall stool, slowly rising, still somehow balancing. The room is breathless, suspended.
Thomas Lauria, multicolored madness, walks in boldly—wearing abstractions will never do, play in waste: The Scrappening—a body suit arousing Mask Still Life III by Emil Nolde. A historically complicated painting made by a man who was himself a Nazi and an antisemite, Mask Still Life III ended up in the degenerate art show for its depiction of non-Western masks. Breathing aggressively, Lauria’s mask seems to nearly suffocate him. There isn’t a conjuring here, but a wrestling match between the original painting and the contemporary performer. The original painting conveys the tension between the facades we wear and primordial emotions, both concealed and expressed. Lauria’s body struts. Lauria’s body confronts. Too long horns, more like bug antennas, wiggle about like balloon animals or a pool floaty. Objects that are inherently playful, childlike, and silly take on a dark meaning here. Then he gets down on hands and knees, lizard lunge, and pulses. One antenna slowly inflates, and the balloon animal comes to life. The crowd is wowed by this strange magic. Then, once inflated, Lauria rises and swaggers backward, and rhythmically removes a matching flogger from their front codpiece, where he self-flagellates. Here, the activation starts to feel intimately personal and heartbreaking. The wearable is made completely of scraps of latex and one pair of holey socks. A mask is both a protector and an inhibitor. I can’t see his face, but I can hear his struggling breath; it’s not always safe to be free.
Amalia Wilson’s I Meant (Um den Fisch) waddles in blindly. Stuck within a tubular papier-mache vase, arms raised above her head, her face completely covered by the vessel she dwells within. She holds a real, dead fish in one hand and a glass vase with a twig and a small red flag in the other. Strung upon the bottom of the vase is a tailgate of vegetables that drag behind her. The fish, an actual dead body—and one of the oldest symbols in the Christian church for the body of Christ—reeks. The stench smells equally feminine and repulsive. The sight of this causes the crowd to giggle slightly for its sheer absurdity. Yet we know the absurd is often a stand-in word for horrors beyond belief. This sculpture references Paul Klee’s painting Around the Fish, hated by the Nazis because it scrambled religious iconography, treating the sacred fish as abject, even dinner. What could be so offensive about this original Klee painting? A fish out of water can’t swim.
The final act, Catching on Thieves, a gender-nonconforming, muscular brown body, hair alive, emerges from the curtain, madness becomes method. The activation title is a nod to the Nazi slur graffitied to the wall at Entartete Kunst. She holds a cardboard cutout of a life-sized naked body, large breasts, erect penis. The cutout in reference to the highly controversial and abused beyond-repair sculpture, Kruzifixus by Ludwig Gies. Since destroyed, Catching on Thieves is its physical embodiment. An almost Christ-like joy emanates from every cell of her body. Sheepishly smiling, Catching hobbles with a limp, towards the crowd. Somewhat nervous, somewhat excited, she approached someone, cell phone in hand, gesturing to take a picture with the cutout. The first observer generously agrees. I feel immediately uncomfortable, and then embarrassed by my own discomfort at the spectacle. Will she ask me to pose for the camera, too? This stunt happens several times as she slowly walks down the aisle to the cross drawing titled The Devils of Loudon are never done. At this point, Catching and the cutout disappear into the crowd. All I see is madness becomes method undulating above the crowd, in front of, because of, despite the cross. The music billows. Then, the movement and music stop. The performance ends.
Exhausted from the three-hour experience and full of unprocessed, highly charged, aesthetic symbolism, I quickly leave. I drive an hour home in the rain. I lay in bed awake for a while. Masina shares days later that they’d asked Chaia to play a Samoan hymn, Lota Nu’u Ua Ou Fanau Ai, during the closing activation. It’s a song that entwines love for the land, the people, and the creator into an anthem. I feel this esprit de résistance all around me as I write this. Perhaps the same spirit of the ballet dancer in The Red Shoes, who could not stop dancing, even unto death. Or like Christ himself, who could not stop loving, even upon a gruesome cross. Soul Stake pierced a sonic wave into the atmosphere and my gut, and sound never disappears; just like time, it only echoes into forever. The performance, tetelestai. The exhibition goes on. And time will continue to speak.
Emily Logan is a nomadic art writer and publicist. Since 2020, she’s been building Space On Space: a media movement investigating the connections between land, power, and art. She’s definitely a mom, which makes her a futurist. Previously, she worked as a publicist at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art and an MS in Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship from Fox School of Business, Temple University.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-red-shoes-1948
https://www.kcur.org/politics-elections-and-government/2026-02-26/kansas-transgender-id-invalid-drivers-license-bathroom-law
https://hyperallergic.com/pepperdine-university-california-school-shutters-exhibition-after-altering-political-art/
https://playbill.com/article/national-endowment-for-the-arts-cuts-grants-for-theatres-as-trump-proposes-eliminating-agency
 | A guest post by
|