Intermediate Positions

Exhibition concept by: Graduates of Art Criticism and Curatorial Training School ’10

Coordinator: Gor Yengoyan

The subtlety of transition times is arduous to gin in twilight. This is a tense of dusk and chiaroscuro when it seems that the body movements are in slow motion.

Catching sight of transition cracks is also complicated in social reality, when everything is changing very fast. The individual seems to appear in a trap between two political systems; one of the formers is a zombie, a remnant in social memory, and the other simulates visions and legends of future.

In such positions of fragile transitions the artist’s role becomes crucial; one appears as an actor of paradigm changes, proposing them to the attention of wide social formations.
But in order to fix this transformation the subject is compelled to bustle from one community and identity to another. By unfolding and occupying the cracks emerging between different territories, between “before” and “after”, the artist gives birth to new subjectivities, new urban identities.

Those are the flexible characters who mark and at the same time blur the borderlines between times and regions.

Mher Azatyan is wandering in city, appearing in spots of misery, wretchedness and demolishment, finding places which lack attention, objects which have ceased from application and have already desisted to be useful.

By being such they have preserved memories and narratives. These places and objects have concentrated the experience of the past and appear to be a bridge to that past.
The shadows of this passing reality are speaking; here and there one can hear their voices – on the walls of abandoned apartments, on broken benches of urban parks or in drained swimming pools. In forms of whispers and moans these voices become a part of a compilation of thoughts.

Tigran Khachatryan is reviving narratives from past; he frequently intensifies/grinds them, but in general the artist actualizes these stories by means of interventions. Referring to the episodes from historical avant-garde he seems to show, what is absent but what can be recovered in present.
In 9th floor installation the changes in entity and the way the difficulties connected with these changes are being overcome are illustrated by the example of one story.
A displacement, which is conditioned by human habits, brings about another type of environment and activities.

Gagik Charchyan
Living within borders, we often deliniate these both for us and for others. The sense of one’s identity is contingent upon the border between the self and the other. Nevertheless, borders do not only divide but unite. Having limitations as well as having the possibility to transgress borders, we exist in the borderline—on the passage of in-between world.

Norayr Chilingaryan is using IT capabilities to open a room for mediations on reality. The transfer of physical dimension issues (political, architectural,
aesthetic and sensual) into the frames of new space makes the discussion
pivotal for the formation of a new community in this very area.