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8/9/2006

Melik Ohanian

De Appel (old location), Amsterdam

Somewhere in Time

de Appel is kicking off the cultural season, under the leadership of new director Ann Demeester, with a solo exhibition by French-Armenian artist Melik Ohanian (1969).

A comprehensive survey of his work can be seen at de Appel’s own premises on the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat. In addition, de Appel and Ohanian are being hosted by other institutions in Amsterdam. At Foundation DeisKa, a former bank building around the corner from de Appel, the seven-screen film Seven Minutes Before (2004) will be shown. In collaboration with Imagine IC, centre for the visual representation of migration and cultures, Ohanian has developed a new edition of the project Peripherical Communities. Ohanian’s Invisible Film (2005), inspired by British filmmaker Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park (1971), will be shown at the Film Museum Amsterdam (Vondelpark 3).

Melik Ohanian was confronted with the phenomenon of image as medium at an early age while observing his father, who was involved in photography, and later while working on numerous film productions as a freelance cameraman and editor. The notion of the ‘invisible’ image, the existence of multiple realities, the operation of human memory and the relationship between time and space, between the individual and the community, are themes that Ohanian frequently touches on.

Ohanian sees the works he produces first of all as ‘instruments’-cum-containers that must be filled with an array of ‘contents’. He develops strategies and methodologies for research and presentation. The range of contents he covers is broad and extremely varied. He delves into the history of cinema and explores socio-political phenomena ? the strike of the Liverpool dockworkers in the work White Wall Travelling (1997) or the position of unemployed Armenian labourers in The Hand (2002) ? and studies the human attempts to fathom and represent the workings of the universe and the solar system. In The Half Mast White Flag (2005) he neutralizes a symbol of federal pride into a universal ‘sign’ of peace and/or surrender, and in Welcome to Hanksville (2003) he represents the observation of a cosmological event while depicting the Utah desert as an ‘earthly’ Martian landscape.

In a former bank office around the corner from de Appel, now home to Foundation Deiska (Vijzelgracht 50), Ohanian is showing The Gear (2004) — a large, stainless steel, rotating sculpture — and the key work Seven Minutes Before, a 21-minute film displayed on seven adjacent screens. During the summer of 2004 Ohanian filmed seven simultaneous scenes in a small valley in a region of southeastern France. The sequences show a convergence of various events, a closed cosmos of landscapes, voices and people. The work can be read as a study in film of the time-space relationship and the way in which multiple story lines suggest the existence of a great meta-narrative.

In collaboration with Imagine IC, Ohanian has completed a new version of the piece Peripherical Communities, which he has already realised in the outskirts of Paris (2002), Seoul (2003) and Dakar (2005). The artist considers the piece a Recording Tool and is making this edition in collaboration with a young group of slammers from the Amsterdam multicultural district the Bijlmer.

On 22 October the Film Museum will be showing Invisible Film (2005) and the film Punishment Park by Peter Watkins (1971), which served as a source of inspiration for Ohanian’s experiment. Punishment Park depicts an imaginary detention camp in the Californian El Mirage Desert and records, in pseudo-documentary style, the agony of a group of young activists who are persecuted for their resistance to the Vietnam War. After its NY premiere Watkins’s film was immediately withdrawn from distribution in cinemas and has never been shown on television in the US.

Somewhere in Time and its additional projects are kindly supported by CulturesFrance

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de Appel (on the side)

In addition to its regular the exhibitions de Appel is offering a selection of 'side dishes’ this autumn, additional events that run from lectures and book presentations to mini-exhibitions. A fixed part of this auxiliary programme will be The Shadow Cabinet, where past and present students from the Curatorial Training Programme (CTP), which de Appel has been running since 1994, will be our guests. They will use the space to make comments about the exhibition policy or to propose their own projects to a wider audience.

The kickoff will be introduced by curator Hilde de Bruijn (NL, CTP 00/01) and artist-curator Gavin Wade (GB) with Strategic Questions - Platform 06 (17 September- 15 October), an exhibition of a series of publications related to 40 questions asked by R. Buckminster Fuller. Included is the new book work ‘What is positive? Why?’ with contributions by Lise Autogena, Yona Friedman, Marko Lulic, Ioana Nemes, Maria Pask, Marjetica Potrc, Oliver Ressler and Jun Yang.

Opening: Saturday, 16 September, 6 pm.
The opening, to be held on Friday the 8th of September, is being organised in collaboration with Witte de With, Rotterdam. From 10 September to 14 October Ohanian is also mounting a solo presentation at Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris (http://www.crousel.com).

de Appel
Nieuwe Spiegelstraat 10
1017 DE Amsterdam The Netherlands
Opening hours
Thu-Sun: 11 am - 6 pm

stampa

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