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5/6/2003

Getting Closer

Ifa Galerie, Berlin

'Four Armenians try to find a way out'
Narek Avetissian, Achot Achot, Archi Galentz und Karine Matsakian

The exhibition "Getting Closer - Four Armenians try to find a way out" is the fifth exhibition in the series "Nationality | Identity", which has been shown at the ifa gallery in irregular intervals since 2001, and which concerns with the global political, social, and cultural changes of the last decade.

Conceived by Mika Hannula, rector at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, the exhibition "Getting Closer - Four Armenians try to find a way out" assembles artistic positions that reflect the current interests and phenomena of Armenian art as well as the situation of the Armenian nation between genocide and occupation, between past and present inside the country and in the diaspora. It shows strategies of how to tackle the changing social conditions and the demands that spring from them. It focuses on questions of identity and nationality and on the formal question of how to revive traditional artistic media in a critical way.

Achot Achot has been living in Paris since the middle of the nineties, where he continued to examine problems of national and gender identity in his art. His theme is the social life of people; at the same time he challenges the social values, which are shook by the most different influences and transformations. In his work, photography and video play as important a role as painting: using his fingers and self-made stamps, he carefully dots color onto the canvas. The pictures could continue indefinitely; they are only limited by the selected format, which for him is a metaphor for self-imposed borders, for self-restrictions that result from traditional, national developments.

Karine Matsakian plays one of the most important roles in her generation of artists; she inquires into questions of female identity in the patriarchal society of Armenia. Like many Armenian artists, she works with the media of painting as well as with performances and video. Her subject has been her own body as an expression of womanliness and of the way she sees herself as a woman, and she has been working with performances for years. After having gone through a phase of pop art in her paintings, in which the newly emerged consumerism and the loss of national identity had manifested itself, her subject has now changed. Instead of working with her own body, she has now devoted herself to the man's body and feelings. In a merciless way, she shows details of and views on male bodies in a series of pictures, which seem to be banal, but in fact break a taboo of Armenian society.

Narek Avetissian represented Armenia at the 1999 Venice Biennial with the project "Post Factum - Earth, Space, Dream", which he had created together with a group of young artists and programmers for the Internet. He is very much interested in using the computer as an artistic means, creating images that "randomly" emerge from the programming work. These pictures are then being alienated, and an infinite number of representations come into being, which are generated artificially but nevertheless seem organic. In a subtle way, he poses questions about the role of man and of the artist in an artificial, technologized computer world.

Archi Galentz has studied in Yerevan and in Moscow as well as in Germany; he thus experienced different cultural impulses. The consciousness of Armenian identity has always been important to him, tough, and has stamped his artwork. Among other things, he works with invented maps, on which he leaves away the national territory of Armenia. In the center of his considerations and reflections are questions of the Armenian state and the post-soviet re-establishment of Armenian consciousness.

The exhibition presents important aspects of contemporary art in Armenia: in addition to questions of nationality and identity, Armenian artists today are concerned with gender-specific role attributions and with moral and ethical questions.

Opening: June 5, 2003, 7 p.m.

A catalogue will be published with the exhibition.

ifa gallery, Berlin
Linienstrasse 139/140

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