ACCRETIONS II

co-curated with Joanna Sokolowska and Tevz Logar Artists: Roman Dziadkiewicz, Shady El Noshokaty, Hassan Khan, Siniša Labrović
Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź 10 March - 3 April 2011




Hassan Khan, Evidence of Evidence II, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel


The word “accretion” refers to expansive growth and build-up of biological organisms. The curators of the Accretions exhibition have appropriated the word as an operational term both to question and to intervene into the modes of public engagement with specific artistic positions.

The Accretions II exhibition in Łódź was preceded by a collaboration between curators and artists (Roman Dziadkiewicz, Shady El Noshokaty, Hassan Khan, Siniša Labrović and Honza Zamojski) in a show in Ljubljana, in August 2010. The Accretions project in Ljubljana was an attempt to respond to specific institutional policies of the Galerija Škuc, and particularly, to its agenda of reconstituting the gallery as a social space that reflects both exhibition strategies and models of artistic and curatorial collaboration. Taking up its title as a structural proposition rather than an overarching thematic framework, the Accretions exhibition consisted of a series of public events which created “work in focus” situations. During daily meetings with the audience, each artist presented a work or did a performance, leaving traces, supplements or new works in the gallery. The exhibition was thus materialized gradually through accumulation of works. This format allowed for intimate and focused engagement with one work of a single artist at a time.

An important motive for our collaboration was the desire to search for transnational trajectories of conceiving aesthetic communities, which would transverse predetermined modes of global connectivity while denying expectations to represent cultural and geographical identities.

The next venue to further the collaboration is the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, where we focus on the question of articulating knowledge in the aesthetic processes.

The knowledge we refer to is inscribed both immanently in the discourse of art, and in its social framework. In Accretions II, we put forward the following questions: How can knowledge be produced, translated, communicated, or obscured in art? How does the circulation of knowledge between intentions, projections of the artist, works of art, participants in artistic projects and a broader audience develop? To what extent is knowledge of art or knowledge gained through art conceived through processes of accretion, accumulation, growth, friction and exchange? Is there in art a state of excess that does not submit to analysis? How does one evoke a sense of the unthinkable, the ineffable and the untranslatable in art? What role is played by a ruptures or a silence in communicating knowledge?

Accretions II has a dual function: on the one hand it is an exhibition that confronts the audience with works by four artists (Roman Dziadkiewicz, Hassan Khan, Siniša Labrović, Shady El Noshokaty); on the other, it is a temporary venue for workshops and performative activities involving students from the Academy of Fine Arts, as well as other participants.

On the Shores of Democracy

Public Conversation with Marko Stamenkovic on the idea, conceptualization and realization of the exhibition Splav Meduza in Celje, Slovenia Sept. 2009.

The conversation took place within the framework of the 4th Summer Seminars Program for Art Curators in Yerevan, Armenia. August, 2009

You Tell Me

Video Program
Art and Desire Seminars, Istanbul, Turkey
June, 2010





The video screening program “You Tell Me”, which incorporates five videos by various artists and filmmakers, takes up the operational character of direct speech acts as a starting point to performatively intervene into the very space of the screening. As opposed to explanatory voice over, which describes and explicates through a naturalized narration, the operative aspects of direct speech acts reside in their power to intervene and change an existing situation, which in the case of this screening program comprises of the audience sitting in a dark room and watching the selected videos.

The videos selected here participate in performative speech acts, which either reiterate an authoritative structure or mark the collapse of this very structure through a failed performative utterance. These utterances are never autonomous or subjective. In J.L. Austin’s example of performatives, when the minister announces a couple as husband and wife, the performative power of his speech is neither reflection nor expression of the minister’s autonomous will, but rather a pronouncement of a predetermined and pre-established social convention. Similarly, in Althusser’s notion of interpolation, it is not the policemen as a carrier of an autonomous subjective will whose pronouncement “Hey, You!” interpolates the subject. Instead, the very utterance of the policemen is always already an authoritative voice of the police as social institution. Then, the utterance is not expressive but rather operative. It is this operative and performative character of the works that abandon the tired interpretative question “What does the work mean?” to pose the question “What does the work do?”

1.Hassan Khan, Rant, 6’45’’, 2008

In Hassan Khan’s Rant the subject is both caught up within and threatened by socialbility, or even by the mere implication of the other. In this highly staged and meticulously choreographed video a subject of an indefinite age and sex enacts relationships that are both highly personal but also formalistic and professional. Nevertheless, the subject is self-fulfilled and self-contained, thus every utterance turns into a rant. As Khan states in his article: “A rant is a hyper-expressive condition—utterances shoot out at an accelerated pace, the subject’s delivery outstrips its desires, the expression is caught up in its own presence and fails to reflect one’s intention, hence the stutter and the breathlessness of hyperventilation. We are therefore always one step behind. Here, what would normally take less than a minute is slowed down to a dense narcotic six-minute confessional and stylized disclosure. The rhetorical construction of a speech act unfolds over a numbed-out musical composition. Although the nature of causality treats each utterance as more than only itself, we have here a syntagm that derives its polyvalence from its material conditions—from the conditions of its appearance.”

2. Aras Ozgun, Can I? 3’2’’, 2002

Aras Ozgun’s “Can I” can be described as an sort of “accidental video”, which emerges from what could be termed as a pre-speech act. The video is comprised of a confused question “Can I” uttered by Avital Ronell, Freudian theorist and philosopher just before her planned interview by arno bohler and susanne granzer Ozgun has utilized this recorded waste and repeated the question pronounced by Ronnel multiple times, and replaced one of the ready-made words with other “ready-made” words which are key to Ronell’s theoretical framework and pronounced during the interview “proper”. This accidental pre-speech act turns into a digitally manipulated voice over, which is nevertheless uttered by the subject directly. This creates a gap between intentionality and accident, meaning and a conglomeration of words that refuse to enter into semiosis.

3. Shady El Noshakaty Stammer: A Lecture in Theory, 12’, 2007

Similarly, Shady El Noshakaty’s video also explores this ambiguity between intentionality and its collapse. In his video and performance series Stammer El Noshakaty incessantly and persistently is trying to read scientific definitions. However, overcome by affect or emotions the source of which is impossible to identify, El-Noshakaky stammers, whines, cries, pauses. The language here is caught up somewhere between expression and communication, or rather, betrays its promise to deliver meaning, and specifically, to reproduce and perpetuate the rationalized scientific language.

4. Lusine Chergeshtyan, Puzzle, 3’32’’, 2009

Lusine Chergeshtyan’s work radically differs from the previous works, since it is entirely textual. The phenomenological experience of the reader is produced through a simple editing of a running text, and specifically, manipulating the pace of this text. However, what it shares with all the previous videos, is yet again the betrayed promise of language to deliver meaning. In Chergeshtian’s Puzzle the female speech turns into a hemorrhage, which on the one hand, conveys a specific experience, but on the other hand, refuses the reader’s access to this experience. At the point of reception, but never utterance, this speech turns into a hysterical cry, as the running text literally escapes from the reader.

5. Wael Shawky, The Cave, 12’42’’, 2005

Cairo based artist Wael Shawky’s controversial video from 2005, the Cave, decontextualizes an authoritatively structured speech, namely a Koranic surrah uttered by the artist himself, without edits or cuts, without flows or scrambles and with a tone of clerical seriousness in a supermarket in Amsterdam. Here, we not only have a rupture between the context of the utterance and the structure and content of the utterance, but also between time and space. The Cave here refers both to the Koranic verse, Plato’s famous metaphor of the Cave and a contemporary space of spectacular consumption.

WINDOWS: Collaborative Multichannel Video Exhibition

American University in Cairo Art Program
in collaboration with
Townhouse Gallery and Rooftop Studios
March 2010

Workshop Leader: Aras Ozgun
Curator: Angela Harutyunyan
Coordinator: Mariam Mekiwi

Windows Project is a collaborative video workshop and video exhibition conducted by Aras Ozgun during his residency at Performance and Visual Arts Department of American University in Cairo in March 2010. 15 students, film makers, artists, academics (with or without prior experience in video art) participated to the workshop and collaboratively developed the exhibition with the works they produced. The exhibition opened at the Rooftop Studios of Townhouse Gallery on March 25th, 2010.

The project provided an open framework (literally, "window frames") which combines and cultivates different experimental narratives, aesthetic techniques and method that are possible in video. It encouraged the audience to relate to the physicality of windows both as (un)demarcators of private and public spheres as well as subjective and social borders or unbound situations through which the subject relates to the surrounding world.

The window is understood as a liminal space, as a metaphor, as a form of experience, as a social function and as a poetic device. Each video contains an "event" that relates to the situation by utilizing narrative or non-narrative form/technique that works with windows: An off-screen voice or dialogue conveying a story, or audible/visible clues of something that takes place in the room behind the camera --or at the outside, or a small act in front or outside of the window, or just an interval of time.

Each video itself is a space that opens to another one, each video contains an "event" that takes place in this opening --a view or a story that relates to a slice of time. None of the videos directly connect to the others: together they
form a heterotopic space, a multiplicity of places, identities and narratives --a room with many views. While each contributors' work remains an autonomous piece, it nonetheless resonates with the others and forms a collective and participatory body of work at the same time.

For the videos, click here.

ACCRETIONS

in collaboration with Joanna Sokolowska and Tevz Logar Gallery Skuc, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Artists: Roman Dziadkiewitz, Hassan Khan, Sinisa Labrovic, Shady ElNoshakaty, Honza Zamojski 4.8.10-3.9.10

Accretions refers to the idea of rhizomatic growth and build up in biological organisms, which if translated into the social world, could be used to imply expansive growth. We appropriate the word as an operational term to both question and intervene into the very construction of aesthetic communities which is a process of coming together and building up. The starting point of our inquiry is related to artistic sources and references and the ways in which singularity of experience can be shared through a particular presence in specific spatial and temporal configurations of the artistic event. And perhaps, the very indeterminacy of these configurations harbor the potentiality of bringing together an aesthetic community. Thus, the outcome as such can neither be predictable, nor obvious even for the curators.

Within the conditions of labor divisions at place in the art world, exhibition making has often proven to be a practice that entails expectations for professionally established and structured procedures of curating. This includes networking, conception of idea, selection of artists and works and organization of events, both creatively and bureaucratically. However, what happens when the process of pre-conceived and pre-designed curating itself becomes dependent upon artistic processes and marks a failure of every predetermination? In this, the final product does not come together through professionally defined considerations but through friendship, political and aesthetic kinship leaving aside politically correct considerations of representing identities and geographies. Within the temporal span of curatorial work and the exhibition as the ultimate result, there are often transformations, transmutations and transmogrifications which are not always obvious in the final presentation.

In Accretions we propose to construct a reflective space of communal engagement which is directly involved with the artists` proposition for a work of art, performance, intervention in a designated time and space. We have invited six artists from locales in which the curators practice—Roman Dziadkiewicz, Hassan Khan, Sinisa Labrović, Shady el Noshakaty and Honza Zamojski to collaborate on accretion of a series of events. We are working with artists who perceive their positions and subjectivity as part of a broader aesthetic community; who question the way in which knowledge and artistic skills emerge and are disseminated and who are able to translate through diverse registers of knowledge.

We would like to test whether these broader concerns upon which the artists were invited to reflect become a departure point for public engagement. The latter includes questions related not only to the (direct and indirect) involvement of the audience/public in the construction of aesthetic experience but also within the historical, spatial and communal locale of the Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana. Negotiating with the Gallery’s specific history and legacy but also with its evolving present, we propose to turn the gallery into a space in which situational social and artistic relationships are given a space to reflect upon the very institutional and artistic frameworks of the coming together of an aesthetic community through continuous engagement in conversations, attachments and detachments.

The structural and formal questions which the exhibition as an event addresses are questions that complicate the distinction between the process of art production and its final destination or reception. Throughout the event, each day is reserved for a single work produced or enacted by one of the invited artists. Each work is exposed or choreographed (written in time) through a given duration to a specific audience which attends an “opening” event every day. Thus what choreography and accretion share is a temporal build up and construction of experience through a process. After this exposure, the work finds a place in the gallery, awaiting other works to occupy a space after each opening. We envision the exhibition as an event through a collection and accumulation of experiences and traces; the art work becoming a trace of its own presence. Through the processual structure of the event , the ultimate result in the form of the final product is never arrived at. This way, art can potentially become a vehicle that may serve to create an aesthetic/political community which is situational and contingent. In short, we would like to curate a social space, an event or an exhibition as a living organism which evolves and transforms throughout time. The event always already takes place post-factum, hence, the exhibition as an accumulation of experiences, bodies, spaces and gazes. This exhibition marks an opening for collaborative potentialities, rather than representing results of collaboration which has already taken place. Collaboration will continue in at least one another location – Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz in 2011.

The idea of the project is inextricably related to the circumstances under which the curatorial team was formed, that is the Summer Seminars for Curators in Yerevan.

Sinisa Labrovic, Artist Selling his Skin. Installation and Performance

Shady ElNoshakaty, Stammer, Installation and performance

Hassan Khan, The Big One (text, photograph from performance and caption)

Honza Zamojski, Ghosts, screening and installation

Coming To You To Not Be With You

Women-Oriented Women’s Collective
August 3-4, 2008, Yerevan, Armenia
Zarubyan 34, Utopiana and Women’s Resource Center

Women-Oriented Women (WOW). Exhibition Project: Arpi Adamyan, Shushan Avagyan, Sarah Chance, Lusine Chergeshtyan, Adrineh, Angela Harutyunyan, Alina Martiros, Astghik Melkonyan, Lusine Talalyan, Tsomak


Parting and Reunion as Processes of Subjectivization
By Angela Harutyunyan



The opening of the exhibition took place on August 3rd, in the garden of Utopiana and Women’s Resource Center in Yerevan, and the 4th was reserved for a video screening and public discussions. The correspondent of gazeta.ru in Armenia writes that the exhibition was the first ecological artistic activism in Armenia, while Polish curator Pawel Leszkowicz comments in his Yerevan impressions on rhiz.eu that the exhibition was the first one to represent experiences of Armenian homosexual and bisexual women (“as well as straight women allies”). However, many were confused by the lack of representation or at least a type of representation which is constructed by the hetero-normative regime to convey and materialize homosexual women’s experience. It seemed that the confusion was partly caused by the absence of a direct and clear message as well as easily identified codes of perceived homosexuality: there were no pornographic works or outwardly provocative gestures.


In its willingness to pose questions rather than impose answers as well as with its lack of a single thematic line, the exhibition was more of a discursive platform than a representational project. Although opening up a discussion of experiences of concrete women, it nevertheless had no claims of presenting and expressing these experiences or specifically packaged identities. We wanted to talk not so much about the expressions of queer identities but about a queering look. This was a look, which never repeats or always repeats as “the same but not quite.” The ambiguity, always already present in the look, was that which defined the project not as a complete representational show but as a platform for communication. It was this ambiguity that our colleague-artists friends, completely immersed in a revolutionary fervor of the present moment, described as a politically inappropriate position. They were talking with a tone of revolutionary urgency which demands direct and clear-cut statements. Instead, the project was offering self-reflection and negotiation, which brought about a set of questions: Is visibility always empowering? Is it possible to find ways of subjectivisation which do not assume an expression of pre-existing identities and in which what is visible can be deceiving and partial while what is invisible, inaudible and ungraspable, meaningful? Is it possible to articulate subjectivities or modes of subjectivisation in-between visibility and invisibility, within the inherently relational exchange between the Self and the Other and in the dialectics of partition and coming together.

The identity politics of the post-modern age packages and sells identities and differences, taking outwardly manifested and self-stylized appearances as signs of these differences; it commercializes and bureaucratizes desires. Instead, “Coming to You Not To Be With You” does not exclude the failure of desire within the dialectics of partition and reunion, thus it escapes the circle of being identified and marketed, easily named and framed. It strives to offer an ongoing dialogue which never excludes the possibility of failure of communication either.

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A Conversation with Members of the Women-Oriented Women’s Collective, who organized the exhibit Coming to You to not Be with You as part of their ongoing project of Self-Mapping: Queering the City. By Shushan Avagyan

The idea of “self-mapping” came about in a very spontaneous way; in December 2007 Sarah and I had gone to see an exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, which we started to discuss on the Women-Oriented Women’s (WOW) listserv: “The exhibit is about the streets, buildings, and boroughs of Chicago. The artists have used various techniques: embroidery, photography, graffiti, one of the works consisted of Arabic spices and herbs to create a mandala-shaped map, i.e. the map of the Arab neighborhood in Chicago perceived through the subjectivity of the artist. In other words, the topography of the city conceived through your own prism of perception and interpretation. There also were video-installations . . .” Angela Harutyunyan responded: “I like this idea of mapping of the self, especially because it is connected with issues that I have been lately obsessed with: imaginary geography, “phantasmic topography,” the city not as it really is but as it exists in our consciousness, in our imagination, or as we see it, feel it, perceive it through our bodies. I think that there is some radical potential in this kind of different, diverse conception of the city (rather than the symbolic regime dictating us how to perceive things, conditioning modes of behavior which serve to power structures)—imagining, interpreting and claiming the space of the city through our own memories, on our terms and in our ways . . . To broaden the idea of mapping, we can also question the recent architectural changes in the city and the forms of desire and subjectivity that they prescribe.” Then we started thinking seriously about these issues and bouncing ideas from our own perspectives. Lusine Chergeshtyan wrote back: “We could base our self-mapping on the topography of love and relationship: memories that record chronologically where and when we first talked about queerness, spaces in which we have had positive experiences and felt free, or spaces that have confined or oppressed us, spaces where we met and formed a group, where we found allies who understood us and whom we understood . . .” Astghik Melkonyan began to conceive her self-mapping in terms of performance art: “There will be silhouettes of couples. I haven’t decided how many, but they are going to be life-size, or maybe not so large. They will be on the ground. I will use flour, sieved through a kitchen flour sifter. Which means I’ll have to make a large template and use the flour to achieve the stenciled image . . . I want to have several images in several places and I need people to be able to interact with those images . . .” Adrineh and Alina Martiros, both from Canada, joined the group in March, and in August the collective—Arpi Adamyan, Astghik Melkonyan, Tsomak, Lusine Talalyan, Adrineh, Lusine Chergeshtyan, Alina Martiros, Angela Harutyunyan, Sarah Chance and I—gathered in the garden of Zarubyan 34 in Yerevan.



Shushan Avagyan: My first question is for Lusine Talalyan. Why was it significant for you to participate in this project of self-mapping (now that you are looking back at the exhibit after approximately a month)? What expectations did you have during the initial stages of the project, during the summer of 2007, and at the end, after one year? Also, what was the strangest or the most unexpected aspect for you in regards to the exhibit? For example, the most bizarre thing for me was the unanimous silence of the news media about the project, with the exception of the Russian paper, gazeta.ru, which echoed with a small article.



Lusine Talalyan: When we had just started thinking about a collective project and when we held our first meetings, I imagined that we would unite as a large group of women and try to understand our own sexuality, our place in society and also our place in the realm of art. It was perhaps the association with society (or the idea of “coming out” to the public) that became one of the main reasons that created arguments, disagreements, and some artists refused to participate in the project. Or maybe that wasn’t the only reason, but in any case, that objective, that desire to have a unified group of artists wasn’t fully realized in the end. The only open manifests about the focus of our project (the mapping of our “queer” selves onto the city) were the placards that we posted all over the city and the blog that we created, oh and, of course, the fact that we invited news reporters. But the most desirable prospect that was realized for me was that we all came together and that the exhibit happened. This is the only (queer) exhibit that I have participated in. We came together being so diverse but at the same time being able to underline our similarities, and this was the most exciting and unexpected thing to me. And it made me think that about the Soviet epoch when they tried gay men, not women, which brought many people to think that gay men were more oppressed than women (homosexuality has always been associated with men, they have been incarcerated and punished for being gay, etc.). But maybe the issue is elsewhere: the fact that queer women weren’t incarcerated back then, meaning that a woman’s violation of societal laws wasn’t conceived as a “violation” and hence completely censored or erased from society’s consciousness, is very much analogous to contemporary views. It falls into the same logic of reporters “failing” to report about the exhibit; this phenomenon is precisely the same politics of erasure. It’s that same mentality that says: sexual relationships between women can’t be taken seriously or it can’t be perceived seriously and so there is no reason to even talk about it. . .

Shushan Avagyan: What do you think is our greatest fear in regards to society? Some of the artists in our project, including yourself, have shown their work in large-scale exhibitions, but in those exhibitions their work wasn’t thematized or labeled as “queer.”

Lusine Talalyan: I’ll talk about my own fears regarding society. One of my biggest fears is coming out to my parents: no matter how strongly I believe or hypothesize that they know, I am certain that they don’t want to HEAR about it, and so I don’t want to talk to them about it. At first I was afraid that they might hear from somewhere else or from someone else, but as strange as it is now I don’t care about that. If they find out, that’s fine, but I am not going to come out to them. I don’t know, perhaps I might have a different view on this later . . .

But what I’m afraid of most is that we (as a collective) might become an instrument, that not only they do not critique or label us, but on the contrary, support us financially, presenting themselves as advocates of progressivism. This implies glamorizing and normalizing what is queer and turning us into their ideological tokens. In the first case with labeling, I think that it’s possible to have or to create a genuine dialog, whereas in the second case the opportunity for a dialog is lost. This is why it was so important that we didn’t have any international organizations that supported us financially; we did everything through our own means and abilities.

When you talk about labeling in exhibitions, what do you mean, Shushan, labeling done by artists themselves or by critics? This brings up a very interesting point, and I had completely forgotten about it - the exhibit that I did with Tatevik (Hakobyan) in 2004, entitled Anyone Who Has the Delusion to Consider Herself Not Deceived. The fact that I’d forgotten that my works have been discussed in terms of lesbian relations, means something. Susanna Gyulamiryan was the curator and the entire text was about lesbian relations in terms of failed love. Then, of course, it was this project of self-mapping that made it possible to talk publicly about homosexuality in Armenia through art, and most importantly not as a gossip, at that. Today, Arpi, Lara and I were talking about the exhibit again and how, for us, the project was realized, that the event had taken place, and that our objective wasn’t at all to produce a final “product” . . .

Shushan Avagyan: Arpi, you have participated in a variety of exhibitions in the past—was this one any different? How so? What motivates your own project of self-mapping?

Arpi Adamyan: My first exhibition was at NPAK when I was 15; I wasn’t even a student at the Academy of Fine Arts yet. I have periodically shown my work in group exhibitions at NPAK and other places since then. Meeting artists such as Lusine and Asya, who are older than me, has helped me understand many things. It is perhaps for this reason that being queer has never been strange to me (a confounding contradiction of the terms “queer” and “strange”). It was never shocking to me when I came out to myself. And I would like to thank both Lusines (Talalyan and Chergeshtyan), Asya, Sona for this.

Shushan Avagyan: How was your collaboration with Lusine Talalyan conceived and what form did it acquire at the end? Is that how you imagined the piece from the very beginning?

Arpi Adamyan: I have always had an affective connection with Lusine’s work; for me, her videos represent the moving version of my paintings. Lusine might not necessarily agree with me—these are my own perceptions. Surely there are differences in our works as well, but by speaking about similarities I want to stress how unified our work is. Collaboration became possible, I think, due to the fact that we kept influencing one another during the past few months. For me, this is an important factor, since it replaced the conventional “malady” of artists, if you will, the imperative to be original, unique, with the need to be unified, to be able to solve issues together, and to share a perspective . . .

After several other collaborative projects I can say that this was my first collaboration that was successful and wasn’t just limited to the designated one week of the show but is continuing till this day. During one of our conversations Lusine underscored that “giving and taking” works for us. I am saying this because her opinion is very important to me.
You were asking if there were any differences between this exhibition and the past ones . . . I don’t know if there is a difference or if I would like to see a difference, but in the previous exhibitions I have never felt a unity among participants. The most imperative thing for me today, I think, is unity—searching for the different ways to unify, taking one another into consideration, seeing and hearing one another, etc. This is what motivated me and mostly I have found what I was looking for.

Shushan Avagyan: What does “Coming to You to not Be with You” mean? How does it describe our exhibit?



Angela Harutyunyan: I think that on one hand the title expresses the dialectic of the relations between the group, i.e. collective, and the individual, and on the other hand it shows the dialectic between the very intimate levels of the interpersonal. This incorporates the idea of being together and not being together at the same time, which means that group communication is taking place not on the basis of collective agreement, which always implies a majority of consensus, but also on the basis of collective disagreement. The Speaker, the “I’ relates to the Other not as an object but as yet another desiring subject. But this desire does not exclude also non-desire or, what’s even more precise, the desire of failed desire. I think it is at this point that the two aspects of the title—the collective and the interpersonal—collapse. Indeed the title is very dialectical . . . Yet at the same time the title crystallizes our fears, in terms of being seen and not being seen. We become visible, we come out to the audience, but only and always partially . . .

Lusine Talalyan: Women have always played the role of the one who waited and waits for the man, take, for instance, Odyssey’s wife Penelope. In this case, it is the woman who is coming and it’s not clear who she is coming to. She is, as if, present and absent both at the same time, and breaks the stereotype of passivity and waiting.

Adrineh: It’s like we are trying to say to the other that we want to approach, to come closer, but that we are different, that we differ and we are coming without the anticipation that in order to understand one another we should be alike. We want to be accepted as queer women: we don’t want to change in order to be like you. We are what we are, and that’s all, yes?




The video program can be found here.
My performance-lecture on the exhibition (Apart We Are Together: Topographical Curating ), here

Photonic Moments 2007

Selection of Armenian Artists
Photon Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

The selection of three artists’ works I chose to represent for Photonic Moments 2007 by no
means aims to serve as a synecdoche to the recent developments in photography in Armenia. Since it would be an impossible endeavor to capture the developments in the field of contemporary photography in such a sketchy project, I have rather chosen to work with contemporary artists who are not photographers, but who refer to the medium occasionally. Thus by adopting a specific conceptual lens discussed below, I abandon every claim for comprehensiveness, objectivity on the one hand and reductionism on the other. It should be noted that the selection reflects my own subjective interests in women artists and intellectual concerns with gender theories both as an Armenian woman and a contemporary art historian and theorist.

What brings Karine Matsakyan, Astghik Melkonyan and Lusine Davidyan together in this arbitrarily selected constellation are a number of related concerns: firstly, all three are women artists who work in the contemporary art field in Armenia, encompassing a range of media in their practice: mixed media installations, video, digital photography, painting and performance. Secondly, they do not identify themselves as photographers per se, and the final product rarely appears as a print but rather as digital slide shows in Astghik Melkonyan’s and Lusine
Davidyan’s case, and as a part of a thematic series that encompasses a variety of media in Matsakyan’s case. Thirdly, all three artists share some fascination, a kind of technological fetishism for the “magical” capacity of digital photography to modify “reality”, thus rejecting photography’s original mimetic function to reproduce the “real”. Most importantly, what these
artists have in common is that they are not limited For instance, Matsakyan’s I am Elle (2000) appears in the form of pop art painting, as a part of the video Music for One Home and photographic prints to mere similarities in utilizing digital and analog photography as an artistic technique and that they are concerned with the articulation of gender relations and more specifically, the idea of a woman as a socially constructed category. The selection I have
made is primarily based on the latter factor.



Karine Matsakyan’s I am Elle presents four close-up photographs of the artist wearing a mask. Her wide open eyes pierce through the mask, threatening to puncture the viewer’s petrifying and objectifying gaze by reflecting its power back upon itself. It is what Craig Owens calls a medusa effect , which challenges the beholder/beheld, the seer/the seen and the object/subject binaries embedded in the techniques of viewing within the long tradition of art history. Thus, Matsakyan, exploring the gender as a literal masquerade by wearing an object mask, simultaneously seduces, threatens and petrifies the gaze and turns the consumer of her image into the one who is being consumed by the puncturing eyes of the artist.



Astghik Melkonyan in her series the “Body of the City” (2004) explores the pose and the immobility imposed upon it by the gaze as a space for phantasmic encounters and erotic games. Hers is the wandering woman who appropriates the post-industrial cityscape with the presence of her eroticized body randomly appearing in different poses. She opens up the possibility of the imaginary, phantasmic realm within the semiotic field of the city landscape: she is its cartographer, the owner and master of signs and at the same time the one whose body is mapped and placed within this sign system. She occupies the margins of the city, the metallurgic waste abandoned to its peripheries, but at the same time she also appropriates the commercial space of billboards and advertisements by investing her body into the system of commodity circulation, of the obsessive realm of production, consumption and appropriation.



In her photo series Apartment no.10 (2006), Lusine Davidyan uses a digital photo montage technique similar to Astghik Melkonyan’s to explore gender as a fluid category, and the contemporary subject as someone who is capable of transgressing the established binary gender categories. Similar to Melkonyan, she also adopts the pose as a technique to confront the viewer with the presence of her queer body. Nevertheless, Davidyan’s presence is always partial in that it refuses to gaze back upon the beholder by hiding her face. Hers is not the female subject that strives for narcissistic gratification in order to be empowered like Matsakyan and Melkonyan, but someone who transcends male and female categories by representing herself as somewhat tragic and at the same time as a bored androgynous boy whose sexuality is always in the
process of becoming.