Window Peace: An Anarchive
By Zoë Tanner, July 11, 2026
The first few notes I took while witnessing Linda Montano perform her Blindfold Window Peace at Public Trust in Philadelphia: breath as performance / rest as performance / sound as gesture / caretaking, chanting, the un-and-re-crossing of legs / a belly that moves / up and down/ air flows in and out of lungs
Montano lay in the window blindfolded, with what appeared to be surgical bandaging, felt squares representing the chakras layered on her chest. Chanting into a microphone, meandering through low hums, sonic “aaahhs,” and windy sighs, her voice passed through her body and out into the street, carried by an outdoor speaker. I saw my reflection in the glass window, my gaze moved between my own reflection and Montano, who was at once aware and unaware of her own visibility. A site for reciprocal looking. The window’s glass collapsed the distinction between performer and observer, my own reflection folded into the performance, implicating me within its field of attention.
The scene unfolded as part of a reimagined Window Peace, initiated by artist Kiran Jandu and presented in March 2026 in conjunction with Raw Material: The Art and Life of Susan Kleckner, the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist at Haverford College. Originally conceived by Kleckner in 1986, Window Peace took place in the storefront window of SoHoZat, a former gallery space in New York City, where, over the course of a year, more than forty women artists each occupied the street-facing display for a week at a time. The piece was a tribute to the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a feminist anti-nuclear protest that began in 1981 outside a U.S. military base in England in response to the deployment of nuclear missiles. The camp grew to include thousands of women, who lived for extended periods in makeshift encampments and organized their protest through occupation, ritual actions, and shared forms of daily life. Kleckner visited and documented the camp in three separate trips, where she photographed, filmed, and recorded their rhythms of collective life and protest. In translating these encounters into Window Peace, Kleckner shifted the site of collective occupation into the frame of the storefront window, asking what it might mean to orient oneself, one’s attention, and one’s activity toward the idea of peace.
Unlike the original Window Peace, the reactivated version unfolded both in a window and within the interior space of Public Trust. We, as spectators, were encouraged to enter into the space of peace, to embody the flow of performed meditation, of peace. I saw the performance on its final day when Linda Montano who performed Blindfold Window Peace as part of Kleckner’s original piece, entered the performance space after having mentored Kiran Jandu’s blindfolded, chakra-based meditation performance for the first two days. Montano, blindfolded, was accompanied by Jandu and somatic practitioner Eddy Levin, clad in a Halloween-style nurse’s coat and cap bearing a staunch red cross. The two acted as facilitators within the performance structure, guiding Montano’s movement through the space, whispering into her ear, chanting alongside her. At intervals, Montano, Jandu, and Levin moved together in slow circulation through the room, walking between and around the seats of spectators introducing their next shared mantra. After each circuit, Montano was guided back to the window where she would either sit or recline, returning again to chant and breathwork. At times, Montono entertained the melody of a song, She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes and Mother Earth.
Window Peace Reimagining 2025 - photo Holden Blanco
I wondered about tranquil spaces / the aesthetics of bodies touching / the motions of being held / care as performance
At one point, Montano heard the sound of a baby in the space and encouraged Levin to bring the microphone to the child. Staccato “baba” sounds filled the room, then a warbling coo. Montano echoed. A shift. The structure of the performance changed. The microphone was soon passed among participants. Each one of us encouraged to add our own voice to the space. Montano prompted animals, laughter, say “aaahh.” It became a sort of call and response. We became cats and cows, woodpeckers and bees. The sirens outside. We laughed together loudly. Sounds of peace. A collective vocal body. The present moment.
I was curious about the blindfold. What does it mean to remove oneself from light? / solidarity with those who are in darkness? / Montano is traveling inward while we are outwards / are we experiencing the same thing?
I was curious about the nurse's costume. They’re wearing it well / but why the costume? / what to make of role play? / do I need to know?
Across the performance, these notions of care, perception, and participation continually shifted in their states—moving easily between genuine practice and aesthetic form. Blindness was at once a performed symbol and a means of inward reflection. Care was at once costume and choreography; its staging rendering it legible as both an aestheticized performance and a sincere act of nurturing. Attention was simultaneously distributed, directed, and collectively produced. Spectators were invited to become performers and participants—a way to open, close, (re)configure a circle. “Peace is fun,” Kleckner said.
Bija mantras, chakras, breathwork, song, meditation, stillness. The performance drew upon traditions of embodied care that long predate the contemporary wellness industry. Yet still it was difficult not to see these gestures through the visual vocabulary of contemporary wellness culture—where these practices are often circulated and commodified as tools for individual optimization and self-improvement. Jandu, Montano, and Levin did not attempt to escape or resolve this tension. By inviting spectators into the performance itself, opening the window, extending the work into the room, they reconfigured and expanded the logic of the original Window Peace, transforming it from a site of exterior witnessing into a more participatory field of collective presence. One where time, rest, and collective care could be reclaimed as a shared practice, an art form.
Kleckner wrote in a 1986 diary entry reflecting on Window Peace. “Have I, SK, created [Window Peace] to be able to finally work out my own need to observe, court, worship (?), study, elevate other women and myself?” At once an activist occupation of space and feminist aesthetic practice, Window Peace was grounded in and grew from the artistic values of ritual, endurance, and connectivity. As Kleckner put it, the performance was about “the simple being there of it.”
Window Peace: An Anarchive was also about the simple being there of it. The return of presence, visibility, and collective attention as a shared condition. The piece was a sincere exploration of experiential performance; earnest movements towards peace as a collective body, which is a far difference from the individualism that continues to permeate across cultural realms today.
“Peace is fun,” Kleckner said / to laugh in a room with strangers / how bodies briefly, imperfectly, share a word.