“Soft mortification of the flesh:” A review of EJ Hill’s Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout (2025)

EJ Hill, Yearning for an Absolute (2025) installed in EJ Hill: Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout, 52 Walker, New York, June 25–September 13, 2025. Courtesy 52 Walker, New York

BY EMMA CIESLIK August 11, 2025

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to see EJ Hill’s new exhibition Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout at 52 Walker Street, an art gallery in Lower Manhattan New York City. As soon as I walked in, I was greeted by a large red curtain framing Hill on a kneeler. On the other side of the curtain were clusters of eight kneelers, permanently puckered from the weight of Hill’s knees, hung on the white wall as paintings. I was exhausted watching Hill kneel for minutes and hours on end--sacralizing kneelers with his bodily devotion. 

Everyday the gallery is open, for the entire run of the show, Hill hosts an endurance performance piece--his first in seven years. Drawing from his 2018 Made in L.A. Biennial presentation Excellentia, Mollitia, Victoria, Hill kneels on the ground in a position of prayer, as well as supplication, suffering and grief, for the whole day. The exhibition is partly inspired by the basilica of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa, Milan, which features a neon installation created by Dan Flavin and completed in 1997 after his death. 

Photo by EJ Hill, 2024

© EJ Hill. Courtesy the artist and 52 Walker, New York.

Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout features the work of this Los Angeles–based artist, musician, and educator, drawing on his religious upbringing in the Catholic faith. Born and raised in South Central, Los Angeles and educated in the Catholic Church, Hill explores the systems that create, perpetuate, and deconstruct the human body and how our bodies are able to move, express themselves, and grow over time, especially thinking about the permissibility and policing of queer and trans bodies and Black and Brown bodies in the United States. 

As David Breslin writes in Hill’s monograph "This Means Everything to Me" published this year, “One element of EJ’s brilliance is his beautiful transmutation of the received--in this case, religious spectacle--into the novel. He cross-wires influences to make the religious spectacle an undeniable medium to explore asymmetries of power, visibility, and agency. EJ does this in service of a prolonged project that questions why Black, brown, and queer people have been forced to persist in a spectral space between presence and absence, life and death.”

“For a long time,” Hill told me in an interview after the show opened, “I have been interested in power and how power dynamics shape us and individuals, groups, communities, and societies, how people wield power, how we hold it, how we wrest it from one another.” 

In Long-slung Promises, Hill explores the ways in which Catholicism informs his morality and dissects the ways in which organized religions, including Catholicism, instill a promise of salvation. As Hill shared in an interview with me, “I’ve never addressed directly my Catholic upbringing and going to Catholic school from kindergarten to eighth grade and then to Jesuit school in ninth grade–in my work at least,” but his Catholic upbringing deeply informs his interest in performance art, specifically because Catholic mortification of the flesh as public penance and performing devoutness are at the heart of his own experiences. 

He was originally hesitant to explore this experience but cited Linda Mary Montano as a critical inspiration to intentionally explore long-form Catholic rituals as art forms in themselves, and tools of contemporary artists to unpack what it means to cleanse and police the body. Montano is an American performance artist raised in a devout Irish and Italian Catholic household. Montano herself joined the novitiate of the Maryknoll Sisters before leaving and returning to college to study art. “A lot of her work,” Hill explained, “is very spiritual, very rooted in religious ritual, experience, and I feel like that gave me license to lean into this a little bit more because it is a big part of me.” 

Hill’s exhibition itself references Montano’s three-hour silent retreats, in which she explored endurance as a form of devotion within Catholicism, sacrificing the body (and bodily comforts) to achieve something higher and otherworldly. This gnosticism partially inspired Hill who himself extrapolates Catholic ritual--and monastic endurance such as cloistered convents where silence is holy and adoration is carried out at all hours of the day--as not only a practice of performance art itself but a religious spectacle for the community and the public. 

Catholic mortification, a tradition that Montano and Hill build on, is a form of devotion that involves the internal and external purification and devotion of the body through physical pain or withholding, whether it’s flagellation using a whip or cane or fasting. Although traditionally mortification rituals and other Catholic rituals are not considered performance art, Hill and Montano argue through their work that long-form mortification rituals, like praying for hours on end and practicing a vow of silence, are an artform all to themselves, albeit traditionally a spiritual one. They are the performance of Catholicism’s power surrounding aesthetics and identity, through which radical devotion becomes public spectacle. 

“Catholicism is so strict and severe, ritualized, and I think," he continued, “somewhere along the way I picked up a tendency toward a type of public penance.”

Installation view, EJ HIll: Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout, 52 Walker, New York, June 25-September 13, 2025. Courtesy 52 Walker, New York. 

The performances were “not any penance for any particular thing, but I was,” Hill said, “always really taken by the idea of giving something up for Lent. It gave me something to look forward to, this personal task to not break or to do without some type of pleasure or a thing that you liked or loved but gave up and sacrificed. It followed me into an art career, the practice of withholding, limiting oneself, restriction, which is this soft mortification of flesh that for me does lead to a type of openness and receptiveness. It’s a purging, it’s a cleansing, that leaves me open to receiving signals from who some might call God.”

It is this form of bodily asceticism that references other saints like Saints Clare and Francis of Assisi who embraced holy poverty to imitate Christ’s own sacrifice on the cross. It is through this sacrifice, some Catholics believe, that everyone--regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender--is sanctified through the mortification of God’s own human mirror. 

But as Hill’s art emphasizes, this is rarely the care for marginalized communities who have been outright kidnapped and killed by the Church. Indigenous children were stolen from their homes, and raped, killed, and reprogrammed in Catholic residential schools. Unwed women were forced into workhouses and mother and baby homes run by Catholic orders, where hundreds (perhaps thousands) of children died. People of color were enslaved by the Catholic Church and its very leaders, enriching an institution that sought to weaponize its own spiritual power against the liberation of all peoples. 

And today, many queer and trans people continue to fight for their place in a Church that denies they exist or if they exist, that they are “intrinsically disordered,” reinforced by the 1975 Persona humana document from the Vatican. 

Hill explores in this exhibition how the mortification of his own flesh allows him to connect closer to God while at the same time denying and shedding attributes and identities that make him human. Whether this was his intention, Hill’s exhibition resonates with me and many other queer and trans people raised Catholic who have had to hide or outright face reprogramming (through purity culture and conversion therapy) to separate ourselves from the “sins” of our bodies, including our same-sex attractions and gender dysphoria. In Low-slung Promises, Hill examines and challenges the commodification and glorification of bodily suffering as both a way to connect with the divine and method of homogenizing. 

As Breslin writes in Hill’s monograph, “in offering up his own body as a projection screen for a culture’s structural violence, was he also satisfying the endless fascination with, the capitalistic loop of, ingesting and then voiding the person, the spectacle, the critique? When does the mystic again become the martyr? When does the stylite become a style?”

Installation view, EJ Hill: Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout, 52 Walker, New York, June 25-September 13, 2025. Courtesy 52 Walker, New York. 

“When I perform these public rituals or these penances, it does feel like I’m opening the channel to allow for that force, that energy, to be transferred through me and outward into an audience or space.” At some points during the performance, he recalls slipping into a deep trance. “It is deep meditation,” he said, “deep intention setting, deep spellcasting, deep prayer, again many names for the same thing.

Low-slung Promises on the Tongues of the Devout will close on September 13, 2025.