Artists
The Blind Dates exhibition opens at Pratt Manhattan Gallery (144 West 14th street), November 18th, 6-8 pm, featuring AH-HA by Nina Katchadourian and Ahmet Ogut. Reception free and open to public
Silva Ajemian and Aslihan Demirtas/ Karen Andreassian with Citizen Walker Sergey / Michael Blum and Damir Nikšić/ Jean Marie Casbarian with Prof. Nazan Maksudyan/ Hrayr Anmahouni Eulmessekian with Professor Anahid Kassabian/ Linda Ganjian and Elif Uras/ Aram Jibilian with Aaron Mattocks as Arshile Gorky’s ghost/ Nina Katchadourian and Ahmet Öğut/ Karine Matsakian and Sona Abgarian/ Stefanos Tsivopoulos with dancers Ursula Eagly, Carlos Fittante & Christopher Williams/ Jalal Toufic with Professor Selim Kuru as translator/ Özge Ersoy with Taline Toutounjian/ Xurban Collective
Blind Dates Project Descriptions, Artist Bios and Project Images Include:
1. Silva Ajemian and Aslihan Demirtas
Remains Connected: The Bridge at Ani
Architectural drawings and model, 2010
At Ani, a bridge once connected the two banks of the Akhurian/Arpaçay River. Today, only the abutments on the two sides of the river remain of the collapsed bridge, one in Turkey and the other in Armenia. Ani now exists in two worlds, at once an important historic Armenian capital–a link on the ancient Silk Road, and an archeological ruin in Turkey bordering Armenia. New York-based architects/designers Silva Ajemian (b. Lebanon) and Aslihan Demirtas (b. Turkey) work together to reveal two stories, and two forecasts. As they approach the bridge from their distinct perspectives, they seek to interweave insights and articulate nested architectural and geographic narratives in order to create illusions of simultaneity and unfold possible realities.
Silva Ajemian and Aslihan Demirtas Remains Connected: The Bridge at Ani Architectural drawings and model, 2010
Silva Ajemian and Aslihan Demirtas Remains Connected: The Bridge at Ani Architectural drawings and model, 2010
Aslihan Demirtas is the principal of Aslihan Demirtas Design and Research Studio in New York. Her practice includes national and international projects that encompass ground-up buildings, landscape projects, exhibition design and collaborative art projects. Demirtas holds a Master of Science in Architectural Studies from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Before establishing her own practice she has worked, among others, with I.M. Pei as the lead designer for the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha, Qatar and Miho Chapel in Kyoto, Japan. She has published articles in journals and chapters in books by MIT Press, Verlag der Bauhaus and Harvard Press. Aslihan Demirtas is currently teaching design studio at Parsons School of Constructed Environments. She has taught at Fordham University and MIT and has lectured at GSD at Harvard University, MIT and Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. www.aslihan-demirtas.com
Silva Ajemian grew up in Lebanon and moved to New York City in 1996. She holds a Master of Architecture degree and a Bachelor of Environmental Design Studies from Dalhousie University, Canada. She has been practicing Architecture since 1996 and has worked among others with Michael Sorkin and Vito Acconci. With her partner, Jorge Prado, she founded todo design in 2003, a multi disciplinary practice encompassing urban, architecture, furniture and graphic design. The firm has been recognized with awards and publications internationally. They have participated in exhibitions, design conferences and trade fairs in Beirut, Palermo, Tokyo and New York. Silva taught architectural design at Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute in Mumbai, and at Dalhousie Univerisity in Halifax. She currently is an adjunct professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and a visiting critic at Pratt Institute, NYIT and Cornell University. www.tododesign.com
2. Karen Andreassian with Citizen Walkers
Ontological Walkscapes / 960”
Video/Internet station, 2010
Inspired by the “factography” practices of the Russian avant-garde (LEF 1923) Karen Andreassian examines two related phenomena in contemporary Armenia. The first one deals with the slow disappearance of Soviet-Armenian architecture and the shrinkage of public spaces due to the construction boom during the last decade, while the second engages us with the peaceful protests which led to the forceful dispersion of the demonstrators during the last post-presidential election at Azatutyoun [Freedom] Square. With both, the artist takes on the role of a “walker” through whom personal stories of ordinary citizens create a map of places (social space) that are neglected, forgotten, or have disappeared. Ontological Walkscapes is part of Andreassian’s ongoing practice of “political walks,” which he created as an almost spontaneous expression of dissent against the manipulation of the February 2008 presidential election results in Yerevan.
Through Ontological Walkscapes/960, the artist adopts one of the precepts of the Blind Dates project by choosing “produced time” as his “point of departure” – more precisely, 960 seconds. The latter also marks the operational code of the website he has created, where the “soft fixes” reflect, in seconds, the intervals between the two clicks. The video component of the work documents his “ontological walk” and ascertains how one can think within the “cracks,” or in-between each interval. The two works combined synthesize the methods of factography and animism (Felix Guattari) as a form of resistance, a process of self-organization.
Andreassian’s blind date is a citizen walker, Sergey, an engineer who worked on the construction of the US embassy complex in Armenia.
Karen Andreassian is a Yerevan-based artist, activist. Exihibitions and projects (selection):«Absence/Presence», Yerevan, 1993; the Venice Biennial, Armenian pavilion, 1995; «Geo-Kunst Expedition» within the framework of Documenta X in 1997; ‘(hi)story’‚ SalzburgKunstverein, Austria 2002; “Adieu Parajanov”, Kunsthalle Vienna, Austria 2003; Since 2003 he has been working on a long-term network project «Voghchaberd» which was presented at the Centre for the Contemporary Image, Geneva, 2004 and XV Biennale de Paris, 2006, and is included in FRAC collection, France. «Ontological Walkscapes», an ongoing project, part ofwhich was presented at 11th International Istanbul Biennial, 2009.
3. Michael Blum and Damir Niksic
Oriental Dream
Video, 2010
Preferring to set up his own “blind date,” Michael Blum invited Damir Nikšić to conceive a project together that tackled the Ottoman Empire’s ruins from Bosnia to Palesrael. Once their collaboration commenced, Blum and Nikšić turned their attention to the question of how Ottoman institutions, centralized in Istanbul, could provide a blanket solution to the many conflicts taking place on former Ottoman territory, from the Balkans, to Palesrael and Iraq – an extreme “One-State” solution, to speak in Middle-Eastern terms. They started discussing Orientalism in general, as well as Western accounts of “Oriental” life from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in particular, made of estrangement, fascination and condescendence. Starting with common examples of representations of the Orient in Western popular culture, particularly in literature (from Albert d’Aix’s chronicle of the first crusade to Rebecca West’s trip to Yugoslavia), music (The Four Lads’ “Istanbul (not Constantinople)”) and film (Lawrence of Arabia). What interests the artists is how long-lasting clichés are crafted and quietly enforced, and the humor that arises from the gap between the positivist belief in the West’s superiority up to the 1960s, and the general skepticism, let alone bitter cynicism, of younger generations.
What resulted from this exploration is Oriental Dream, a whimsical critique of Orientalism traces still present throughout the Balkan landscape. Taking the fate of Ottoman headgear–the fez–as a stereotypical or clichéd sign of the now-defunct empire, their work is crafted in the form of a short film where the two artists perform a duet reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy. It depicts a staged chase between the two that takes place in and out of the maze-like cobblestoned allies of Sarajevo, parodying the oddities of the East/West divide. The work makes us reflect upon the residues of Ottoman culture in contemporary life and the ultimate fate of an empire in ruins.
Michael Blum and Damir Niksic, Oriental Dream, Video,2010
Michael Blum (Jerusalem, 1966) is an artist and writer based in Vienna
and Montreal. His work aims at critically re-reading the production of culture, myths, and history. Recent projects include A Tribute to Safiye Behar, 9th Istanbul Biennial (2005), Lippmann, Rosenthal & Co., De Appel, Amsterdam (2006), Cape Town – Stockholm (On Thembo Mjobo), Mobile Art Production, Stockholm (2007), and Exodus 2048, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2008), and New Museum, New York (2009). He is currently a Guest Professor at Ecole des arts visuels et mediatiques, UQAM, Montreal. www.blumology.net
Damir Niksic is a Stockholm-based conceptual artist from Sarajevo,whose work in video, installation, and performance often addresses Orientalism in cultural and cross-cultural psychology. His work has been exhibited in a variety of venues throughout Europe and the US, including the Ars Aevi Museum of Contemporary Art, Sarajevo; National Museum of Montenegro, Cetinje; Trevi Flash Art Museum, Trevi; Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade; National Museum, Szczecin; National Gallery, Skopje; Kyoto Art Center, Kyoto; Palazzo Papesse Centre for Contemporary Art, Siena; Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Tallin Art Hall, Tallin; Locarno Film Festival, Locarno; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Sammlung Essl, MUMOK Museum, Pallais Lichtenstein Museum of Modern Art, Wien and the 50th Venice Biennial. www.damirniksic.com
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4. Jean Marie Casbarian with Prof. Nazan Maksudyan
(Re)imagining a Narrative
Photographs / Text on Glass
Untitled 1, 2, 3, 4
30”x38”
Untitled Filmstrip – 80+ thumbnail photographs
2”x174”
Black & White Archival Pigment Print
Antaram’s Journey
3 panels – Turkish / English / Armenian
35”x35”
Text on Glass
“History is not about the past but about the present. We (inevitably) look back from where we stand – it’s always about our today.” – Nazan Maksudyan
Utilizing the archives of the Near East Foundation, established in 1915 as the first international philanthropic organization in America and currently housed at the Rockefeller Research Center in New York, (Re)imagining a Narrative addresses the reliance on archival photographs to understand and identify subjective and historical truths. Using a story based on scholar Nazan Maksudyan’s great-grandmother, a 1915 genocide survivor, artist Jean Marie Casbarian weaves an imagined space that speaks to the boundaries of language and the complicated contradictions inherent within an archive.
Nazan’s story, divided into three chapters and rendered in her three languages (Turkish, English and Armenian), comingles with Jean Marie’s constructed narratives between the rescued and the rescuer. The viewer is left to reflect on an invisible culture that continues to remain obscured behind a veil of memory. Jean Marie, a German-Armenian born and raised in the United States, and Nazan, an Armenian-Jew born and raised in Turkey, look back from this place of now, and re-mine a metaphoric landscape that has been indelibly scarred by its own history.
This project made possible with the cooperation of the Near East Foundation and the Rockefeller Research Center.
Jean Marie Casbarian, (Re)Imagining a Narrative, Photographs/ Text on Glass, 2010
Jean Marie Casbarian, (Re)Imagining a Narrative, Photographs/ Text on Glass, 2010
Jean-Marie Casbarian incorporates photography, film and video projections, sound, sculpture and performance into her artworks. She received her MFA from Milton Avery School of Art at Bard College in New York and along with a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, she has received a number of awards and artist residencies. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Currently, Jean-Marie is Chair of the Studio Arts Program at Transart Institute, a low-residency MFA program based in Berlin and New York City where she also teaches and mentors graduate students.
Nazan Maksudyan, PhD received her PhD in History from Sabancı University in 2008 with a dissertation on the social history of orphans and destitute children in nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. She taught in Boğaziçi University and Sabanci University in 2008 and 2009. She was a post-doctoral fellow in the program of “Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe” (EUME) 2009/2010, in Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study). Currently, she is an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fellow for postdoctoral research at Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. She has published several articles on the history of children and youth in the late Ottoman Empire. Her current research focuses on Ottoman children during the First World War.
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5. Hrayr Anmahouni Eulmessekian with Prof. Anahid Kassabian
Solemnity
Wall sculpture with video projection, 2010
Solemnity seeks to mourn what is impossible to mourn. It is an audiovisual critique of elaborate recreations of “trauma” and “atrocity” in documentary works that embellish a sense of authenticity, or foster fantasies of witnessing, suffering and understanding. It is also an examination of alternative means of exploring catastrophes of long ago. The work seeks to highlight the trauma of re-presentation itself when the past is in oblique ruins. The first component in this two-part installation is an extremely slow-moving video projection of the grainy remains of individuals in a documentary photograph titled “March of the Armenians.” The second component involves an array of mini-speakers facing a wall in a grid and covering a large surface. The muffled sound, in asynchronous signals, is directed into the wall, and the projected image veils all the speakers, from which one hears Armenian, Iranian, Palestinian and Turkish poets/writers.
Poets/Writers: Nancy Agabian, Najwan Darwish, Lola Koundakjian, Amir Parsa, Alan Semerdjian, Maral K. Svendsen, Alene Terzian, and Fatma Ulgen, Ph.D.
The projected photograph courtesy of Near East Foundation, New York
Hrayr Anmahouni Eulmessekian with Prof. Anahid Kassabian, Solemnity, Wall sculpture with video projection, 2010
Hrayr Anmahouni Eulmessekian: Born in 1958 in Beirut, Lebanon. A graduate of Nishan Palandjian Djemaran he attends the Academie Libanaise des Beaux Arts for two years. In 1984, leaving behind the ravages of the first ten years of the civil war, moves to San Francisco and receives his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute. Considered a post-disciplinary artist often making ephemeral works, he employs varied media, such as film, video, silkscreen, photography, and painting, to interrogate the nature of representation, subjectivity, language, identity and history as constructs. His works have been exhibited, screened or broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Yerevan and Dubai as well as most recently at a workshop at the Sharjah Biennial. A founding member of the San Francisco Armenian Film Festival, he serves on its curatorial team. http://www.ehrayr.com
Anahid Kassabian‘s research and teaching focus on ubiquitous music; music, sound, and moving images; listening; disciplinarity; music and new technologies, especially games, virtual worlds, and pervasive computing; and music and media scholarship drawing on feminist and postcolonial theories.She has also written, most frequently with David Kazanjian, about films made by Anglophone diasporan Armenians. She is the author of Hearing Film (Routledge, 2001) and of the forthcoming Affective Listening (University of California Press). She received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, and went on to serve on faculties of Women’s Studies, Literary Studies, and Communication and Media Studies at universities in California and New York, before moving to the UK. Anahid currently serves on the Board of Directors of Aunt Lute Books (since 1992), a feminist press in San Francisco focusing on works by women writers from underrepresented communities, on the Advisory Board of ArteEast (since 2003), a Middle East arts organization in New York City, and on the Board of Directors of the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival (since 2009), the largest festival of its kind in the UK.
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6.Linda Ganjian and Elif Uras
Navelstone
A functional ceramic-tile sculpture, 2010
Navelstone is a monument to the interconnected histories of Armenians and Turks in Ottoman-era ceramic art traditions. The navelstone (göbektaşı) is the central platform in the traditional Turkish bath (hamam), a heated surface where people gather to relax or to be scrubbed. The sculpture serves as a metaphor for the bitterly fraught past shared by both nations and is also a nod to recent attempts to establish diplomatic relations between Armenia and Turkey. The navelstone functions as a site of rebirth, realized through a direct confrontation with personal and public history––a figurative shedding of dead skin. Its tiles reinterpret the Ottoman traditions of Iznik and Kütahya by using their collective visual vocabulary of motifs as a framework for narrative elements. Uras presents a contemporary perspective on the role of Armenians in Turkish society and culture (both historical and current), while Ganjian details episodes of her family’s story in Ottoman and Republican Turkey. Both of them share a cultural legacy in the rich traditions of Iznik and Kütahya, which under Ottoman patronage and with the labor of Turkish and Armenian artisans, among others, flourished in the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Their collaborative intention is to bring tiles from these Ottoman centers together, thus underscoring a shared cultural legacy that is neglected under the weight of historical tragedies and animosity between two nations.
Linda Ganjian and ElifUras, Navelstone, A functional ceramic-tile sculpture, 2010
Linda Ganjian is a Queens-based artist who makes large-scale sculptures inspired by Middle Eastern carpets and calligraphy. Her work involves the accumulation and arrangement of hundreds of handmade miniature forms, derived from impressions of her childhood, as well as of the urban environment. Her work has been exhibited in New York and abroad. Highlights: Artspace, New Haven, CT, (“un(spoken)” 2009), National Academy Museum NY (“183rd Annual Invitational, 2008), Socrates Sculpture Park (“EAF 2007”), Queens Museum, (“Queens International” 2006), Storefront for Art and Architecture (“Portable” 2006), eyewash@Boreas Gallery (“Urban Designs” solo show 2006), the Brooklyn Museum of Art (“Open House: Working in Brooklyn” 2004), and Stedelijk museum de Lakenhal in Leiden, Holland (2001). Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America, among other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from: the Pollack-Krasner Foundation; Artslink; the ARPA foundation; and the MacDowell Colony. She recently was awarded a public art commission for a school through the Percent for Art program. More info at www.lindaganjian.net
Elif Uras was born in Ankara, Turkey and lives and works between New York and Istanbul. Her paintings on canvas and ceramics are concerned with the tensions and slippages between modernity and tradition. For the past four years, in a residency at the Iznik Foundation, in Iznik, Turkey, she has been creating work in ceramic that recontextualizes the Ottoman tradition of pottery and its visual vocabulary. Uras holds a B.A. from Brown University in economics and a J.D. at Columbia University School of Law. She received her B.F.A. from School of Visual Arts in 2001 and her M.F.A from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003. Selected one-person and group exhibitions include: Galerist, Istanbul (Panaroma Pasaji/Panaroma Arcade, 2009), Pera Museum, Istanbul (Octet, 2009), Kirkhoff, Copenhagen (2008), Smith-Stewart, New York (The Occidentalist, 2007), Mary Boone Gallery, New York, (View (Eleven), 2006), Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2006), Mario Diacono Gallery, Boston (2005), PS1/MOMA (Greater New York, 2005), Greene Naftali Gallery, New York (2003), Andrew Kreps Galllery, New York (2003) and Proje4L, Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul (Organized Conflict, 2003).
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7.Aram Jibilian with Aaron Mattocks as Arshile Gorky’s ghost
Gorky and the Glass House
Inkjet prints, 2010
Inspired by some of the titles of seminal painter Arshile Gorky’s well-known compositions (e.g., Garden at Sochi, Khorkom and Agony), Aram Jibilian explores the idea of the late artist having lived in an “in-between” space or state of exile that afforded him no home other than that which he created on his canvas. To capture Gorky’s lingering spirit, Jibilian’s photographs take us to the painter’s final home in Sherman, CT, where he hung himself, and where several neighbors have spoken of encounters with his ghost (New York Times, 2003). For Blind Dates, Jibilian and his collaborator, dancer Aaron Mattocks, create a series of images loosely based on a 1948 Life magazine profile that depicted Gorky looking out of his “Glass House” onto an open landscape. Gorky, who witnessed massacres and the death of his mother by starvation, had a more somber view: although he appreciated the light that entered during the day, at night he only saw darkness to be looking in. Mattocks performs the role of ghost, wearing a mask of Gorky’s face from his iconic painting The Artist and his Mother, 1926-1936. Jibilian and Mattocks use the architectural structure of the glass wall to present a view of what might be the current home of Gorky’s ghost.
Aram Jibilian with Aaron Mattocks, Gorky and the Glass House, Inkject prints, 2010
Aram Jibilian with Aaron Mattocks, Gorky and the Glass House, Inkject prints, 2010
Aram Jibilian arrived in New York in 1998 to pursue a Masters of Art at New York University‘s Steinhardt School of Art and Arts Education. Just after his master‘s thesis exhibition in the spring of 2000, Aram was invited to show at 80 Washington Square East Galleries along with other selected artists who had graduated from N.Y.U. in the past ten years. He was invited back again in 2005 for the exhibition, Art Noise, Steinhardt Alumni. In 2004, his work was selected by artists Jack Pierson and Cindy Sherman to be part of a group show of emerging artists that took place at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York City. This fall he will be exhibiting at the Pratt Manhattan Galleries as part of the Blind Dates Project. Aram currently works as the Director of Photography Archives at The Pace Gallery as he continues to exhibit throughout the city.
Aaron Mattocks, a Pennsylvania native and Sarah Lawrence College alumnus, studied dance with Viola Farber, Dan Hurlin, Sara Rudner and Mark Morris. He has performed in works by John Jasperse, Christopher Williams, Kathy Westwater, Ursula Eagly, The Little Lords, and Opera Erratica. He assisted Mr. Morris on the staging of Stravinsky’s Renard for the Tanglewood Music Center. He is a member of OtherShore, performing in works by Annie-B Parson/Paul Lazar, and Jodi Melnick. He recently appeared in John Heginbotham’s One-Man Show at Joe’s Pub and with Yoshiko Chuma and The School of Hard Knocks in the 2010 River to River Festival. He will portray Death in the upcoming Supernatural Wife with Big Dance Theater, opening in Paris in March 2011, then subsequently at the Walker Arts Center and BAM’s Next Wave Festival.
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8.Nina Katchadourian and Ahmet Ogut
AH-HA
Performance, Installation, 2010
Although they have only been set up on a blind date, conceptual artists Nina Katchadourian and Ahmet Öğüt have decided to bind together for life. Their project AH-HA is centered on the act of exchanging letters in their names through a legalized transaction, and involves trading two letters in their names that already overlap, namely, the “H” and the “A.” The gesture of trading one letter now (the A) and another letter later (the H), most likely upon the event of one of their deaths, might seem reminiscent of an organ donation or blood transfusion. Only the even and reciprocal nature of the exchange creates a different dynamic: one of barter, trade, or rebalancing, rather than of donating or salvaging. The resulting artwork entails documentation of their process that will bear legitimate legal weight and responsibility, even if they fail. During the opening of the exhibition, they performed signing the agreement with the supervision of a lawyer/public notary. On view is the video documentation of this ceremony.
Nina Katchadourian and Ahmet Ogut, AH-HA, Performance, Installation, 2010
Nina Katchadourian is an artist of Swedish-Finnish and Turkish- Armenian-Lebanese heritage who engages issues of geography and identity in her artworks. Nina Katchadourian’s wide-ranging, inventive conceptual practice encompasses sculpture, photography, video, sound, and public projects in which she highlights and alters familiar systems with unlikely observations, interventions and “improvements,” resulting in irreverent, memorable works that are at once philosophical and accessible. Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California, and lives and works in Brooklyn. She received a BA from Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island (1989); an MFA from the University of California, San Diego (1993); and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program (1996). http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/
Ahmet Öğüt, of Kurdish-Turkish background, was born in Diyarbakir (Turkey) in 1981, lives and works in Amsterdam. He works with a broad range of media including video, photography, installation, drawing and printed media. He received his BA in painting from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey in 2003, his MA from the Art and Design Faculty at Yildiz Teknik University in Istanbul in 2006 and he completed a two year residency at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 2007 – 2008. Solo exhibitions included Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), 2010, Artspace Visual Arts Centre in Sydney, 2010, MATRIX Program, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive BAM/PFA, 2010, Künstlerhaus Bremen, 2009; Kunsthalle Basel, 2008; Group exhibitions include Performa 09, The third biennial of visual art performance, 2009; 5th Berlin Biennial, Berlin, 2008; Stalking with Stories, Apexart, New York, 2007, Normalization, Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, 2006 and 9th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, 2005. In 2009 Ahmet Öğüt co-represented Turkey at 53rd Venice Biennale. In 2010 he received „Europas Zukunft“ prize from Museum of Contemporary Art (GfZK) Leipzig, 2010. http://www.ahmetogut.com/
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9. Karine Matsakyan and Sona Abgaryan
Avatars of Yerevan
Animation video and paintings on paper, 2010
Karine Matsakian (b. 1959) and Sona Abgarian (b. 1979) embark on a
cross-generational journey to chart the unchanging position of women
in their native Armenia. In this subtle animation video, they explore
overarching issues of gender roles, feminism, and freedom of expression, expanding on their previous works’ critique of male dominance and consumerism in the art world and society at large. The video unfolds in a virtual world with the avatars, or digital personae, of the two artists performing against a green screen background, as if in the visual field of an early arcade game. Their puppet-like, computer-generated bodies move fluidly, at times acting like analog receivers of consumerist desires, and allow the artists to escape from the limits set by everyday conventions in order to reaffirm themselves as individuals or humans. The green screen background highlights its own infinite potentiality, as it could be replaced by any other image at any given time—a condition that is imbued with both freedom and anxiety. Through this the artists interrogate a woman’s “role” as one of perpetual editing, constant negotiating, and open to reformulation. What are the parallels between edited, artificial online environments and curated artistic systems? The result is a recounting of suppressed realities where the theatricality of gestures performed by Matsakian and Abgarian underscore the real conditions of Armenian society, and international art systems.
Karine with Sona, Avatars of Yerevan, Animation video and paintings on paper, 2010
Karine with Sona, Avatars of Yerevan, Animation video and paintings on paper, 2010
Karine Matsakyan was born in Gyumri , Armenia in 1959. After graduating from the Yerevan Academy of Fine Arts in 1985, the paintings of Matsakian have been consistently exhibited within Armenia and Europe . Her solo exhibitions include ones held at Charly Chacaturian Gallery in Yerevan (1997); Kultur Kontact in Vienna (2001); Leube Kunst Project, Salzburg (2001), where Matsakyan was an artist in residence; and most recently “Cultural Body” in Armenian Center for Contemporary and Experimental Art in Yerevan (2009). Among the numerous group exhibitions in which Matsakyan has participated are “Third Floor” held at House of Artists in Yerevan (1987); the 49th Venice Biennale (2001); and “Getting Closer” held at the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, ifa) in Berlin , (2003). Matsakyan currently lives and works in Yerevan
Born in Berd, Armenia in 1979, Sona Abgaryan is a Yerevan-based artist whose often collaborative works examine the role of children and women and its expression in Armenian society. Her work were included in the XLIX Venice Biennale as well as the seminal Armenian contemporary at exhibition Adieu Parajanov. Abgaryan’s first solo exhibition “Cool Generation” was organized by Eva Khachatryan at NPAK (ACCEA) in 2003. Abgaryan is the co-founder of the first girls’ rock band in Armenia – “Incest” and currently, the organizer of “Rusty Pumpkin” media festival.
10. Stefan Tsivopoulos with Ursula Eagly, Carlos Fittante & Christopher Williams
Dance DNA
Documentary video and performance-workshop, 2010
Dance DNA is a video essay by Stefanos Tsivopoulos about the history of zeibekiko dance. It is composed of archival footage, photographs, texts, and fiction films, and is also based on interviews with selected contemporary dancers of the New York scene. Through these various sources, the video aims to decode the DNA of zeibekiko, and unfold the thread of experiences and representations associated with it.
Rather than a single dance, zeybek constituted a family of dances originating from the Zeybek warriors of Anatolia in the mid 19th century. These ritual dances, related to war-making techniques, eventually became popular and spread out from the mountain regions of the Aydin area down to Izmir and beyond. Originally, the most common form of zeybekiko was danced by several people, all together; it was staged and orchestrated, demanding coordination between its performers.
Zeybekiko was relatively unknown in Greece. It was only after the defeat of the Greek army in Asia Minor in 1922, and the subsequent exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923, that zeybekiko reached the Greek mainland and was transformed into zeibekiko. The thousands of incoming refugees included some highly competent musicians who brought with them their rich musical tradition. Zeibekiko was incorporated into the rebetiko culture that flourished in the Greek cities, especially in harbors. The term rebetiko refers to the music of an urban subculture evoking themes connected with crime, prison, drink, and drugs, while also talking about love, grief, loss, death, and poverty. In this context, zeibekiko emerged as the most typical dance and rhythm of the rebetiko genre; a dance reinvented in the taverns through improvisation by all those trying to follow and reenact the songs’ zeybek patterns. Zeibekiko grew into a male solo dance performed by a single dancer at a time.
Dance DNA is a back-and-forth trip through time and geography. It reflects on the passage from zeybekiko to zeibekiko, from a collective ritual to individual improvisation, from rural to urban, from only male to mostly male, and from traditional to marginal and then on to the mainstream. Dance DNA contemplates the poetics and politics of zeibekiko.
Archive Sources: Benaki Museum Photographic Archive; Eurokinissi Photo Press Agency; Gennadius Library Archives /The American School of Classical Studies at Athens; IEMA – Institute for Research on Music and Acoustics; Can Dündar;
Timon Koulmasis. Researcher: Galini Notti
Stefanos Tsivopoulos (b. 1973) is a Greek artist who lives and works in Amsterdam and Athens. His work is included in shows at the Manifesta 8 Murcia, 1st Athens Biennial, Witte de With Rotterdam, BFI Southbank London, Friedericianum Kunstverein Kassel, ev+a Biennial Limerick, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, Museum of Contemporary Art Heidelberg, Centre Photographique d’Isle Paris, Sammlung Essl Vienna. He has been artist in residence at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam, Platform Garanti Istanbul, IASPIS Stockholm and in 2011 artist resident at ISCP NY.
Christopher Williams is a dancer, choreographer, and puppeteer. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. He has danced for Tere O’Connor Dance, Douglas Dunn & Dancers, Rebecca Lazier’s TERRAIN, John Kelly, and Yoshiko Chuma & the School of Hard Knocks, among others, and has performed for puppetry artists Basil Twist and Dan Hurlin. His own works have been shown in New York City at City Center,Danspace Project, Dance New Amsterdam, Dance Theater Workshop, P.S. 122, La Mama, and internationally in Bogotá, Colombia. In 2005 he received a New York Dance & Performance “Bessie” Award for his work Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins, and he has since collaborated with members of the acclaimed vocal ensembles,Anonymous 4 and Lionheart. He is the recipient of fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has been commissioned by The Dream Music Puppetry Program, Tisch School of the Arts, and Princeton University, among others, and has held creative residencies at Movement Research, Dance New Amsterdam, Joyce SoHo, Djerassi, White Oak Plantation, Yaddo, The Yard, and The Liguria Study Center for Arts & Humanities in Bogliasco, Italy.
Carlos Fittante is of Spanish/Italian descent and is a graduate of the School of American Ballet. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Dance from Empire State College. He is the artistic director of BALAM Dance Theatre, a unique dance company that fuses contemporary dance and diverse dance styles from around the world with Balinese theatre. A virtuoso male Baroque dancer and choreographer, Fittante performs and teaches extensively in period music events around the United States. He is also on the faculty of the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, where he teaches Mask & Gesture and Movement for Actors. He has extensive performing credits, including the Metropolitan Opera, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; ABAO Opera, Bilbao, Spain; Santa Fe Opera; Ballet Santa Barbara; New York Theatre Ballet; Neo Labos Dance Theatre; Temple of Jehan; Danzas Españolas; and Gamelan Semara Ratih. He has performed at prestigious venues, including Lincoln Center, NY; the Kennedy Center, Washington DC; Barbican Center, London; Suntory Hall, Tokyo; Yale University; Princeton University; Columbia University’s Teachers College; and Bard College.
Ursula Eagly makes bizarre performances full of darkness, humor, and other contradictions. Her last piece, Fields of Ida, premiered at Dance Theater Workshop in October 2009, and toured to Macedonia and Albania. Her approach to movement — and specifically her interest in solo improvisation — is deeply influenced by four years of working with choreographers Yoshiko Chuma and Kathy Westwater. Ursula is currently engaged in an on-going collaboration with the Macedonian choreographer Iskra Sukarova. www.ursulaeagly.org
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11. Jalal Toufic
How to Read an Image/Text Past a Surpassing Disaster?
Photographs, Text, 2010
No one has yet shown an interest in translating my published yet forthcoming book The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Forthcoming Books, 2009) to Turkish, notwithstanding that in the 1920s and 1930s, Turkey exemplified such a withdrawal! But were I one day to be asked to give my permission for a Turkish translation of this book, my response would be that the book’s translation to Ottoman is a condition of possibility of its translation to Turkish; in other words, until there is a translation of the book (or of parts of it) to Ottoman, I will refuse any request for its translation to Turkish. Will such a translation to Ottoman—for example, the one done at my instigation by Selim Kuru—contribute to the resurrection of tradition? Will such a translation of a published yet forthcoming book to an ostensibly past and largely forgotten language prove to be itself forthcoming even after its publication?
Jalal Toufic (concept) with Prof. Selim Kuru (translator).
Jalal Toufic, How to Read an Image/ Text Past a Surpassing Disaster? Photographs, Text, 2010
Jalal Toufic
Born to an Iraqi father and a Lebanese mother, Jalal Toufic, “a thinker and a mortal to death,” has influenced and/or collaborated in an untimely manner with an emerging generation of visual artists from the Middle East, including Walid Raad. He is the author of Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), Over-Sensitivity (1996; 2nd ed., 2009), Forthcoming (2000), Undying Love, or Love Dies (2002), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005), ‘Âshûrâ’: This Blood Spilled in My Veins (2005), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (2009) and Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009). Several of his books are available for download as PDF files at his website: http://www.jalaltoufic.com. Toufic currently teaches at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. He will be a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD in 2011.
12. Ozge Ersoy with Taline Toutounjian
The Timeline Project (tentative title)
Poster
Commissioned for the Blind Dates exhibition, The Timeline is a mapping exercise that highlights the changes in the fields of museology, archaeology, and the visual arts and culture in the late Ottoman Empire. The project not only explores the legacy of the artistic and cultural production in the 19th and early 20th century Ottomans, but also raises questions about the ways in which contemporary art, modern art, and traditional art forms are defined and categorized often through clear-cut definitions and curious ruptures from their predecessors. The Timeline aims to challenge these contentions; explore the diverse continuities and discontinuities in the visual arts; and question the lack of communication between contemporary and historical art practices as well as cultural institutions. The project aspires to be interpretive and suggestive. It emphasizes the processes of adaptation, negotiation, experimentation, and contestation, which make up this history, and more importantly it provokes questions, rather than simply revealing hitherto ignored links.
In response to the rise of nationalism and the growing pressure from the European powers in the 19th century, the Ottoman officials sought to reform administrative, military, and cultural institutions. They attempted to create a new understanding of citizenship, that of Ottoman, which aimed to integrate the diverse religious and ethnic groups in the empire into a single national identity. Against this background, The Timeline takes the format of a wall vinyl that explores the key moments, institutions, and individuals in the visual arts and culture. It also includes a related set of questions to trouble the linear historical narrative. The subjects include—among others—the entry of drawing classes to the curriculum of engineering, military, and finally civil schools; the first collections of military artifacts, Greco-Roman antiquities and Islamic art works; the changing collections of the Imperial Museum; the first photography studios in Istanbul, Cairo, and Beirut; teachers and students of the School of Fine Arts; and also key artistic and cultural producers, including Abdullah Brothers, Osman Hamdi, and Ibrahim Calli.
Ozge Ersoy with Taline Toutounjian, The Timeline Project, Poster
13. Xurban Collective
Building Blocks
A mixed media installation, 2010
Any curious observer strolling through the Anatolian landscape may notice many “abandoned” villages. Without any historical data, it would be hard to guess the period of their occupation, the exact evacuation date, reasons why people left, and what they did before and after their departure. They are the silent testimonies to a troubled history, dating back centuries, or as recently as a decade, involving ancient residents of the land, namely Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, Arabs, and sometimes even Turkic-Muslim sects. The villages all have ancient names and histories that have been repressed and outright changed by the authorities, but nevertheless remembered vaguely by a living few, old enough to confuse myth with history.
Xurban.net recently embarked on a 2800-km journey to five different cities in Anatolia, Ankara, Erzurum, Kars, Artvin and Trabzon, located in varying geological zones. On view is their survey of villages in ruin, engulfed by earth.
Functioning as an international collective since 2000, xurban_collective has members located in Izmir, Istanbul, Linz and New York City. Core members of the group are Guven Incirlioglu and Hakan Topal, whose transatlantic collaborations take the form of on and offline new media projects and installations. Xurban_collective’s mission is to instigate the questioning, examination, and discussion of contemporary politics, theory, and ideology, and their unique intercontinental perspective is well served to provoke a consideration of these issues. Documentary photography, video, and text are often combined in an effort to render visible the multiplicity of informative layers inherent in the subjects or situations explored. xurban_collective exhibited internationally including projects in institutions such as the 49th Venice Biennial (2001), the 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003), PS1/MoMA (2005), Apexart (2004)[2], Exitart (2005) and ZKM – Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe (2004). For more information; http://www.xurban.net/
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