"Melik Ohanian (T)HERE – installations"
2004-01-30 until 2004-04-04
Saint-Gervais - Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine
Genève, , CH

Melik Ohanian, born 1969 in France, lives and works in Praris. The Centre pour l’image contemporaine presents [T]HERE, a solo exhibition by Melik Ohanian includes works: White Wall Travelling (1997), The Hand (2002), Sign Word Book (2003), You are mY destinY (2003) and Selected Recording. The works are multi-media (video, photography, installation, text), Melik Ohanian explores the notions of territory and space, as the title of the exhibition suggests [T]HERE, the play on words between here and there.

Wooden furniture invites the visitor to enter the universe of the artist, Melik Ohanian, who conceives its relation with the spectator as: "Those who contemplate or understand, the more they feel free to come face to face with my work, the more happy I am. One piece is above all a receptecal, that gives, of course, but it's also a structure which receives." A part of furniture holds, Sign Word Book, an edition of books realized at the time of an event with the BF15 in Lyon in May 2003. With this occasion, the artist invited Armenian refugees and assilum seekers to erase the definitions of the words of Larousse's illustrated dictionary; a White Paper results where the words, the diagrams and the illustrations survive. You are mY destinY is an installation based on the fortuitous discovery by Melik Ohanian of a homonym which lives in New York. The artist was born in Armenian France but whose origin is incited to seek his roots. He recreates himself as the Armenian exile through a private diary that the spectator can consult. Three photographs of the series Selected Recording are also to be discovered in this first gallery of the exhibition.

IMAGE
Melik OHANIAN,
The Hand, 2002,
DVD, moniteurs, son et texte,
dimensions variables
Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel

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