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.