calendario eventi  :: 

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3/6/2009

Voulu/ Oblige'

Forte Marghera, Mestre (VE)

Armenian Transnation: Krossing
Colateral Event 53rd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia

Artists: Achot Achot/ Emily Artinian
S. Der-Meguerditchian/ Archi Galentz/ Christopher Atamian

Coordination: Silvina Der-Meguerditchian
Assistant: Héctor González

In the sphere of national and transnational belonging, the positioning of VOULU / OBLIGÉ (desire/obligation) as distant points on the same spectrum opens avenues of approach to the wide field of political and cultural heritage in a very fertile way. To renounce an idea, only because it contradicts another would mean to deny whole worlds.

The exhibition VOULU / OBLIGÉ, outskirts of a small contradiction is the latest project of underconstruction, a large scale collaboration that has been in progress for four years. During that time, this platform for Armenian artists has focused on recurring, sensitive issues in a globalizing and "internetizing" world, including identity, nationality, citizenship and social cohesion. In those four years, artists and intellectuals have worked together to find possible answers through virtual and real dialogues in the form of artistic works, exhibitions, writings, and meetings. Some of the questions explored: What does ‘being Armenian’, or an identity ‘under construction’ mean in the 21st century? Who are the Armenians anyway and how do they want to be seen by themselves and others? Can a virtual community of Armenian artists legitimate itself as a sustainable settlement? How possible is it to have meaningful dialogue with partners spread around the world? Is it possible to develop common goals and real, qualitative communication in virtual space? One of the outcomes of this whole process is shown in the exhibition Krossing, a collateral event of the 53rd Venice Biennale.

The underconstruction artists' commitment, a powerful resource and altogether a metaphor for the rhizomatic construction of the transnation, proposes works which do not claim the univocality and solidity of national symbols, but which aim to be like strings composing a plot. Being out of place, displaced, in geographical and symbolic senses, becomes an affirmative option for eluding the established categories which organize the production and circulation of art and knowledge in terms defined from the centre.

The search is not for a harbour of identity but for allies in the unsheltered celebration of an emancipated flowing. Not belonging, along with the tranquilizing effect any identifying mechanism would imply, but a perpetual longing and desiring, as a mobilizing, joyful vital force. (Estela Schindel)

In Achot Achot’s spiritual binerf works photography is not only juxtaposed against and mixed with abstract painting: Achot Achot also reconciles two seemingly diverging views of life with each other and synthesises them. His photographs of young women with their palpable eroticism address as well as dissolve the separation of body and soul that is so inherent in Christian-Occidental history. The borderline between ‘The Self and the Known’ becomes irrelevant, the yearning for ‘The Infinite’ being the underlying goal. Merging abstraction and figuration, materiality and texture results in a different, spiritual and yet sensuous perception of the «self versus reality». Achot Achot relates in his work to Vedic knowledge: Disharmony of existence arises from ignorance: I do not understand, I am not understood. Mutual understanding between people at the highest level is impossible without knowledge which is transcendental in relation to human experience. Human experience is subject to error, because one’s senses and mind are imperfect and limited. For true perception of reality (without excluding subjective perception) the perfect spiritual knowledge is necessary. That is how Vedic knowledge is.

Emily Artinian recently became executor for and also one of the heirs of her deceased father’s estate. If inheritance can be reduced to precisely described objects (as legal and economic structures tend to emphasize), one would say that this consists of real estate and property investment companies. For thisPLACEd, in her new, compound role as artist and executor/property owner, Emily considers the more opaque aspects of inheritance. Having lived far from the estate’s location in Pennsylvania since she was an adolescent, she investigates her own relationship to this land and people. She takes the name Poppy Engels, a heteronym encoding her uncertainty about her father’s drive for extensive ownership of property, something she often questioned him about in his lifetime. One strong sense – speculative, but insistent – is that this obsession was not unconnected to his own parents’ loss of home, and homeland, when they were displaced to the United States as refugees. Dead Dad presents portraits of this property in a series of photographs. An accompanying artists book reprises and re-sites the photographs, and, incorporating discussions Emily and her father shared before he died, adds textual meditations on the intricate legacy of inheritance and the complex emotions and responsibilities embedded in ancestral history.

Christopher Atamian
"Who am I?” Nigoghos Sarafian asks repeatedly in his seminal 1947 poetic novella The Bois de Vincennes. For Sarafian this basic ontological question was intimately linked to the question of language. Born in Varna during the last days of the Ottoman Empire, Sarafian—like many of his Armenian contemporaries—settled in Paris where he lived as a political and intellectual refugee. He was educated in French schools and explains that when he wrote in Western Armenian as an adult, the language was already foreign to him. Sarafian’s writing is important in part because it attempts to incorporate the notion of exile into language itself. As a third generation descendant of Armenian Genocide survivors, I was fascinated by Sarafian’s fate. Born in New York City, I attended French school, learned English after French, and Armenian after nine other languages. My project attempts to examine the role that language plays in identity. By randomly projecting excerpts of The Bois de Vincennes in the original Western Armenian and in English (translation mine), I attempt ask whether the questions that faced an exiled Armenian diasporan in the late 1940’s are still relevant to the increasingly transglobal modern world of multi-linguistic and polyphonous transnations. I’d also like to suggest that language perhaps erects as many borders as it destroys, that it can be intensely revelatory but isolating as well. Sarafian after all was doubly invisible—to other Armenians who no longer read their own language and to the world-at-large, which remains largely ignorant to this day of Armenian literature. What Babel has unleashed can perhaps never be put back together again. But as technology accelerates and pushes us towards either a future of peace or one of destruction, we should understand the role that language plays in creating and undermining identity.

Archi Galentz
The series of objects titled Not Red Banners was begun in 2003 as a response to Marina Abramovich’s New Hero images. The banners, or flag pieces, do not symbolize a specific political doctrine, but certainly I was trying to "charge” them with a political suggestiveness, in order that they have appeal for at least a decade or so. They are made of wood, fabric and steel staples, and eschew the use of expensive new media. They are constructed as paintings to use the effect of temporarity. My attitude as an Armenian artist allows me to play with the interweaving of minimalistic form and lively surface. I use a specially woven silk and see-through orange and violet gauze as a mix of fine layers that changes colour depending on light and the angle of view. Viewers of contemporary art usually see these banner objects simply as red fields, and are likely to interpret them as signs of leftist activism. I do not mind this kind of misinterpretation.

Silvina Der-Meguerditchian ties a net. She connects the disparate, builds bridges between worlds apart or seeks a dialogue with the unknown. A recurrent theme of her work is the remembrance of the ethnic dislocation of the Armenian people and the genocide they suffered. She uses photographic memorabilia and official documents and merges them in her crochet collages into individual painful stories. Silvina Der-Meguerditchian’s work represents a type of mnemonics, namely the individual and collective art of commemoration. Her main focus is always on the actual process of joining and dissolving, constructing and deconstructing identity. In semantic fields she explores the space between the image and the written word, naming it, celebrating it, dissecting it into its smallest components. Paper - the primary support of the written word - is punctured by the materiality of wool or sewing thread. The words "we”, "love”, "place” are deconstructed in a thicket of fibers, becoming an enigma difficult to decipher. This "woolly encoding” with its soft, porous surface, speaks to the osmotic properties of language and the permeable limits between ideas and their signifiers.

For additional press information and inquiries please contact:
Mr. Héctor González Leonhardtstr. 15 14057 Berlin Germany Tel. 0049 (0)327 02400 Email: yarkoviz@gmail.com

Professional Preview: 03 - 06 June
Opening: 04 June 17:30 h.

Forte Marghera
via Forte Marghera Mestre (VE)
10-18, chiuso lunedi'
Ingresso libero

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