Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground

Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground

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Gagik Arotuinian—Kiss the Ground Curated by Todd Bartel Thompson Gallery, The Cambridge School of Weston Published on the occasion of the exhibition Gagik Aroutuinian—Kiss the Ground September 5 – November 15, 2014 © Thompson Gallery, The Cambridge School of Weston Forward © 2014 Todd Bartel Essay © 2014 Todd Bartel Edited by Eli Keehn Design Todd Bartel Printed on demand by Lulu.com Checklist photos © Gagik Aroutiunian, [except pp. 18-22] Exhibition photography © 2014 Todd Bartel All rights reserved The Cambridge School of Weston 45 Georgian Road Weston, MA 02493 Cover: Aroutiunian, Traveler and His Road B3 [detail], 2000, welded/fabricated steel, patinas, water, battery, light, wires, transferred photographic images, resin, 78 x 20 x 20 inches

Thompson Gallery 2

Kiss the Ground Gagik Aroutiunian, September 5 - November 15, 2014 A New Armenia, part 1, December 6, 2014 - January 20, 2015 (Armenian Museum of America) Talin Megherian, December 18, 2014 - March 13, 2015 A New Armenia, part 2, January 25 - March 1, 2015 (Armenian Museum of America) A New Armenia, part 3, March 30 - June 13, 2015

Kiss the Ground is a five part exhibition series that examines and celebrates contemporary Armenian art, one hundred years after the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The first exhibition in the series showcases the art of Armenian-born, Chicago-based Gagik Aroutiunian, whose art centers on issues of identity, memory and the displacement of family. Works on display include multi-media assemblage sculptures, paintings and video projections.

ABOUT THE THOMPSON GALLERY The Thompson Gallery is a teaching gallery at The Cambridge School of Weston dedicated to exploring single themes through three separate exhibitions, offering differing vantages on the selected topic. Named in honor of school trustee John Thompson and family, the Gallery promotes opportunities to experience contemporary art by local, national and international artists and periodically showcases the art of faculty, staff and alumni. The Gallery is located within the Garthwaite Center for Science and Art, The Cambridge School of Weston, 45 Georgian Road, Weston, MA 02493. M–F 9–4:30 p.m. and by appointment (school calendar applies). Visit thompsongallery.csw.org to view exhibit art.

ABOUT THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL OF WESTON The Cambridge School of Weston, located in a Boston suburb, is a progressive, coeducational, day and boarding school for grades 9 through 12 and post graduate. Established in 1886, the school is dedicated to fostering individual strengths and deep, meaningful relationships through a wide range of challenging courses and a variety of teaching styles. csw.org

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Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground

Forward & Acknowledgements The Kiss the Ground exhibition series would not exist in its current form if not for Adrienne Der Marderosian, who proposed most of the roster of artists for the gallery’s 2014-15 itinerary. In many ways, she acted as a co-curator, not only searching the local community for strong visual artists and bringing outstanding creators to my attention, but also suggesting writers, filmmakers and historians for accompanying programming. Der Marderosian’s suggestions provided a wonderfully full picture of what I have come to call the New Armenia. I am eternally grateful for her contributions, which have proven to be a treasure beyond expectation. Moreover, the community of creative individuals she suggested have all, in their own ways, become collaborators in the overall Kiss the Ground project, making this particular series of exhibitions unlike any I have put together thus far.

I would also like to acknowledge my colleague in the history department, Anjali Bhatia, who has kindly advised me on a number of historical points and in some cases provided essential editorial feedback.

I am indebted to Roger Hagopian and Marc Mamigonian for their constructive advice and critical feedback regarding the respectful portrayal of the Armenian Genocide. I am most grateful to Gagik Aroutiunian, who gave a great deal of time and energy to drive his work from Chicago to Weston. I am impressed by his candor, his professionalism and his exceptional gifts as an artist. He provided pages of answers to my dozens of questions as I pieced together the exhibition and the accompanying catalog.

The idea to focus on the theme of the Armenian Genocide arose out of familial 6

circumstances, coupled with The Cambridge School of Weston’s dedication to engaging with issues of social justice. While the Thompson Gallery explores many topics related to creative inquiry, it is consistently dedicated to investigating the topics of diversity, equity, privilege, tolerance and injustice as it works to define the phrase “social justice” for future generations. But my own unusual background largely inspired this year’s examinations, rather than a specific need or desire to fulfill the gallery’s mission.

Through my marriage to Talin Megherian in 1990, I joined the Armenian community as an odar—an “other,” an “outsider.” Odar, though easily seen as a derogatory idea, is a term I grew to love because of how I was taken in. It was a strange but also wonderful experience to be reminded of being an odar while at the same time creating connections, establishing trust and adjusting to augmented family life. Even during my courtship years with Talin, which began in 1985, the Megherian family accepted me as one of their own. They candidly shared their stories, the horrors of modern Armenian history. Fresh out of college, at a time when I felt I was on top of the world—felt that I knew the pulse of the world and was part of the next wave of well-educated movers and shakers—I still remember the unfathomable shock when I learned about the Armenian Genocide at my first Armenian/American Thanksgiving. How was it possible to have never heard of the Armenian Genocide?

I didn’t only get a history lesson about the Armenians: I heard stories about my extended family fleeing for their lives, some not making it, some getting separated and some miraculously being reunited.

Thanksgiving and remembrance took on an entirely different meaning for me.

The history of the Armenian people is a grim one. The statistics of the events of nearly one hundred years ago are far too staggering, and the hundreds of thousands of stories that must be shared are far too many, to voice in any single examination.

But we can identify with the suffering of the Armenians as we recognize their need for closure. The Kiss the Ground exhibition series came together to provide a venue for a handful of Armenian artists to share their work and ideas about their heritage and their relationship to it. To live life after trauma without the hope of resolution is a purgatory no human being wants to endure.

But to endure silence, to be denied the right of a dissenting voice while living in purgatory, is something far more complex.

Kiss the Ground, then, is a glimpse into Armenian history voiced by the work of twelve visual artists: Gagik Aroutiunian, John Avakian, Gail Boyajian, Adrienne Der Marderosian, Jackie Kazarian, Aida Laleian, Talin Megherian, Yefkin Megherian, Marsha Odabashian, Kevork Mourad, Jessica Sperandio, and Apo Torosyan.

Kiss the Ground provides a platform for the voices of just a few representative Armenians—artists who are forced through circumstance to keep alive the memory of their traditions, their people, their families and their friends. When a dominant and oppressive force denies total disclosure of the whole truth, what recourse does the oppressed have but to remember? There is no other possibility but for the Kiss the Ground exhibition series to be a personal experience for those on the inside of generations of shared trauma.

of as a three-part series, has grown to five exhibitions at two venues. During the process of editing this first catalog, the Thompson Gallery collaborated with the Armenian Library and Museum of America (ALMA) to extend the series. Now, the third part of the project—A New Armenia, which was originally a single show, scheduled for the spring—has been expanded to include two separate exhibitions at ALMA and conclude with the final, originally planned exhibit at the Thompson Gallery in the spring of 2015. I wish to acknowledge Father Vasken Kouzouian of the Holy Trinity Armenian Apostolic Church (Cambridge, MA) for his part in connecting me with ALMA. I also would like to thank ALMA Curator Gary Lind-Sinanian for his enthusiasm and assistance in bringing this exhibition to a wider public.

To the gallery’s visitors and readers, we ask for forbearance and openness. These exhibitions and personal stories are complicated. However, the aim of the series is to shed light on one of the world’s extant moral dilemmas: the two main arguments regarding the last remaining days of the Ottoman Empire and the deportation of the Armenians. One side of the argument calls the events of 1915 genocide. The other side claims there was no genocide in 1915.

Kiss the Ground voices the Armenian side of the story.

Todd Bartel Gallery Director, Thompson Gallery September 20, 2014

The Kiss the Ground exhibition series came together very fast. But the network of creative individuals was so rich that the show, which was initially conceived 7

Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground

Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground ԵՐԿՐՊԱԳՈՒԹԻՒՆ

Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground Maybe some day, they will face the truth and give us some peace.1 Elliot Baker, 2014 It is not the same kind of experience for my generation as my parents or grandparent’s generations; we experience this reality differently. It passed into me in different form—into my identity and through that, into my art. They were the lucky ones that did not lose their lives and they were able, through the build up of bits and pieces, to continue living their lives and passing so much humanity and love and goodness into their children.2 Gagik Aroutiunian, 2014 Kiss the Ground is a five-part exhibition series that examines and celebrates contemporary Armenian art at a particular moment in history, organized to coincide with the centennial memorialization of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. The first exhibition in the series showcases the art of Armenian-born, Chicagobased Gagik Aroutiunian. The exhibit includes a small but focused selection of Aroutiunian’s multi-media assemblage sculptures, paintings, installation art and video projections, all informed by the history of his family and the aftereffects of a culture nearly brought to extinction.

In 1980 Aroutiunian “escaped the Soviet Bloc… and while traveling in Canada…asked for political asylum.”3 By 1991, he had earned two degrees in visual art, concentrating on painting and sculptural media. For the past two decades, Aroutiunian has explored themes of memory and identity through the imagery of family, loss and displacement. When asked what the audience should know about his work, the artist explains: 10

I think it is important to know that my parents and grandparents were genocide survivors. I can be considered a second or third-generation genocide survivor. Genocide studies show that the trauma does not stop at the generation that experiences the genocide. So the experiences of second and third generations continue to affect the next generations.4 In conversation, Aroutiunian generously shares his memories and history—the stories of his family that he experienced himself, or that he remembers hearing in his youth and now keeps alive for his family to carry forward. In his art, however, Aroutiunian’s stories are not legible in a narrative or visual sense. Rather, the attitudes and feelings of what has been endured are made visible through Aroutiunian’s use of materials. The objects and images Aroutiunian assembles are routinely disembodied from their context and seemingly strewn haphazardly in proximity to each other. His sculptures and paintings are frequently made up of small bits, assembled into larger structures and incorporating found and ersatz fragments alongside the artist’s own fabrications.

Sculptural presence is important for Aroutiunian because of its capacity to reveal physical proof of existence. His work with the immaterial processes of light, film and projection, on the other hand, exposes the contrasting impermanence of thought, feeling and memory.

Most everything Aroutiunian employs in his imagery is broken or separated in some way.

Photographs are printed—the backgrounds often removed and cut away—and adhered onto various surfaces, then coated with resin, and precariously balanced on other materials or beneath water. Metal is cut, bent, fabricated, given a patina and welded into conglomerate networks. Stone is cut, carved and grooved, then stacked in such a way that images,

objects and structures can be lodged in the resulting fissures—much in the same way seedlings find fertile ground in rock crevices.

When Aroutiunian exhibits his sculptures that incorporate battery-powered lights, the gallery is instructed “not to replace the bulbs or power sources when they fail.” Fleeting phenomena, such as waves, illumination, reflections and refractions, play key roles in his work; the artist respects the natural life cycle of his materials and his exhibits are intended to outlast these individual elements. Look now and remember.

In the physical works, images of people among broken or fragmented surroundings stare back at the viewer, often in unsettling and wavering manners; the projected works, on the other hand, are distinctly depopulated. There is great intention in Aroutiunian’s isolation and placement of things; viewers are encouraged to wonder about the selection, placement and combinations he creates. As he describes in his artist’s statement (p. 146): Sculptural processes and materials are manifestations of object/matter. Images, video and light, on the other hand, represent illusion. While the first is a primary means for me to represent identity and its displacement, the second is a way to represent memory and its transience.

By exploring contrasts, Aroutiunian juxtaposes particular sets of artistic interests, pitting one material/quality against another—the opaque with the transparent, the permanent with the ephemeral. What is concrete is at odds with what is only essence.

Paintings, Sculptures and Projections In his paintings, Aroutiunian incorporates paint in much the same way as he uses light phenomena—for its transient properties.

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Gestures, calligraphic mark-making and the canons of Abstract Expressionism are ideal vehicles to govern emotional impetus. Where his raw feelings and emotional wounds collide and mingle, the artist’s feelings as he paints homages to family members shifts from painting to painting as memories merge with the novelty of a given moment. While the paintings share a similarity of combination—the central placement of photographs surrounded by a frame of painted gestures—the astute eye will notice few repeating motifs. The artist has painted over two hundred paintings revisiting each family member—a visual registry and diary.

Similarly, Aroutiunian’s sculptures reimagine family over and over again. While the primary elements of his sculptures are made up of fragments of raw materials assembled with the artist’s personal rules of transience, it is important to take note of the recognizable objects sparsely populating his sculpted works.

In his 1996 work To My Mother—Between Two Stones, for example, the artist embeds a shoe form-keeper among welded bits of metal.

Thoroughly subsumed in the fabric of the work, the shoe reference is easily overlooked. But to catch a glimpse of it is to call to mind the desire to keep worn things as new as possible. Such ideation of “shoes” recalls similar objects and associations—pedestrian exodus, for example, or the memories every person has of receiving help to put on their shoes as a child, or even the metaphorical concept of putting oneself in another’s shoes. With such everyday utilitarian objects, associations abound and any viewer may find personal meaning. What stories and memories are conjured by such inclusions?

Aroutiunian’s projections and sculptures that incorporate time-based media take advantage of the inherent nature of film—the succession of stills that make up a moving picture. In considering how Aroutiunian constructs his filmic work, it is helpful to think of film-stills12

in-succession in the same way the artist builds up his sculptures and paintings—one piece at a time. In his 1998 multi-media sculpture Artsakh (Wings), the pieced footage, looped by the monitor at the bottom of the work, shows an Armenian landscape with a collapsed highvoltage transmission tower5—connectivity is rendered obsolete.

The high-definition projection House of Memories is a work of stunning visual and aural complexity. Though it is simple in its premise—a visual juxtaposition between analog and digital systems of memory decay—it is perhaps challenging for viewers to immediately recognize the correlative imagery of a decaying house and broken electronic circuitry. The imagery reveals itself slowly. Human memory fails, but so do the machines we make to remember for us. During his 2004 trip to his childhood home, Aroutiunian, flooded with personal memories, filmed his journey around the decaying building. Once he returned to the United States, he assembled broken bits of computers, phones and touch screens into the forms of house silhouettes, using the same principles as stained glass to create cohesive sculptures. House of Memories is an amalgam of film footage of two distinct kinds of memory.

Both projected film and windows transmit light, and it is this transmission the artist was interested in juxtaposing. While apprehending the imagery of the film, viewers have to contend with issues of attraction and repulsion, reinforced by the ethereal light and sound show. The accompanying soundtrack to House of Memories provides the exhibition’s aural ambience. The soundtrack—a work in its own right—is a collaged audio mix with snippets of Chopin’s Nocturne #1, Haydn’s Piano Sonata #s 53 & 56, and a Bach Partita, each intermittently interrupted by snippets of two Armenian a cappella lullabies, Nani Bala [Grandmother’s Baby] and Tikranakerti Orortsayin [Tikranakerti6 Lullaby]. As the Western and Middle Eastern

musical styles shift abruptly back and forth, appropriately contrasting visual imagery shifts too: images of the artist’s childhood home in Armenia, which is desolated beyond repair, are juxtaposed with close-up photographs from his House of Memories sculptural series—sculptures of composed circuitry taken from electronic devices associated with memory: cameras, printers, computers, phones, scanners.7 Aroutiunian has provided a statement specific to House of Memories, which can be found in the Artist’s Statements section (pp. 145-147).

Bird, the final work in the exhibition, is a multimedia installation that leaves a lasting impression and illustrates the weight not only of Aroutiunian’s burden, but also that of the Armenian people in general. In this deceptively simple piece, a film projection on a wall, of a bird in flight, is interrupted by a birdcage, which is both illuminated by the projection and casts a shadow on the wall behind. Viewers can move around the cage, which is situated in the middle of the room and raised up into the air by a thin, welded pedestal frame. Viewers cast shadows upon the wall when they are behind the cage.

The bird image, which occupies the center of the screen for much of the film loop, flies inside the centered cage shadow. Every once in a while, the bird flies outside the shadowy confines. Art critic Philip E. Bishop beautifully describes the intellectual exercise: This is all an illusion, we might reassure ourselves, an artist’s little riff on Plato’s cave.

But see if the human heart doesn’t lift just a little when the bird’s shadow “escapes” the cage, and sag again when it returns.8 Bishop’s reference to Plato’s cave, in this instance, takes on the weight of a hundred years of sadness, turmoil and pain on the scale of an entire population. But it is also important to recognize that the bird never escapes the parameters of the projected light.

Aroutiunian’s exercise, which keeps the bird always in the frame of the projection, teaches us an important lesson. The cage is only an illusion, and the bird is still confined. Indeed, the bird experiences moments of freedom, but in the end, it is still imprisoned by a larger, more illusive, but still confining space. Bird exposes the elephant in the room: How can the Armenians know of anything else when all they know is still uncorroborated history?

Aroutiunian’s juxtapositions raise simple but penetrating questions: why the unusual coupling of materials? Why combine traditions from different cultures? What is lost or missing? Why remember? Why, in some sense, are Armenians not free?

Armenians, and the world as a whole, did not have a word to describe the systematic “destruction of some one million Christian Armenians under the auspices of the Ottoman government in 1915-16.”9 Henry Morgenthau— the U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913-16—called it “the murder of a nation.”10 Without the word genocide at the world’s disposal, however, international law at the time regarded “crimes against humanity” as “crimes committed by one state against the citizens of another.”11 Therefore, “Armenians, as Ottoman subjects, were excluded from this category” because at that time “no international convention existed to cover crimes perpetrated by a state against its own people.”12 Turkey takes that fact as their high ground. But as one Turkish historian has pointed out, “The failure of the official Turkish state approach is its insistence that this immense crime was a justifiable act of state necessity, which therefore allows the country to avoid taking any moral stance on it.”13 It is not surprising, then, to find that many Armenians, like Aroutiunian, keep the memories of their families alive through the telling of their stories or through the creation of art 13

to remember them by. Decades after the massacres, the term genocide was coined in no small part to describe what had occurred in 1915. Although Aroutiunian did not directly experience the Armenian Genocide, he absorbed the stories of his family and neighbors and lived under its shadows during a time when the Armenian Genocide was referred to as “the Forgotten Genocide.”14 Unlike his parents, Aroutiunian grew up learning about the concept of genocide, and the term was available to him in reference to the experience of the Armenian people. Aroutiunian’s work, within such a context, primarily deals with the effects of the history and unrest his generation has lived.

Genocide the Word What we are dealing with here…is the annihilation of the Armenians.15 Talât Paşa, June 30, 1915 The recent history of Armenia, specifically that of the last one hundred years, is a story that is not at rest. Modern Turkey is the legal, official and cultural successor of the Ottoman Empire, which consisted of many cultural groups including Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians. Armenians continuously existed in Eastern Anatolia (Asia Minor) for around 3000 years, until 1915.16 In that year, the Armenian population, along with the Assyrians and Greeks, found themselves driven out of the region. In his book, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Turkish author Taner Akçam, describes why: Following their shocking defeat in the Balkan War, 1912-13, the Ottomans lost more than 60 percent of their European territory. A deep belief developed that it was impossible to live side-by-side with the empire’s remaining Christian population, or 14

even worse, that Ottoman Christians posed a threat to the empire’s very survival. Thus the ruling Ottoman-Turkish authorities formed a policy which aimed at homogenizing the population of Anatolia, the territorial heart of the empire. This policy had two main components: the first was to disperse and relocate non-Turkish Muslims, such as Kurds and Arabs, among the Turkish majority with the purpose of their assimilation. The second component involved expelling non-Muslim, non-Turkish people from Anatolia, which resulted in the removal of two million people in all, essentially the region’s entire Christian population. While the Armenians as well as Assyrians were targeted by special measures aimed at their annihilation, Greeks were also expelled. In total, almost one-third of the Anatolian population was either relocated or killed. What is crucial is that this ethnic cleansing and homogenization paved the way for today’s Republic of Turkey.17 The removal of Armenian people from Turkish regions resulted not only in the deaths of millions of Armenians,18 but also led to the destruction and loss of countless properties, the decimation of art and artifacts, and the severe reduction of the Armenians’ historic homeland.

The stances of most Armenians and Turks today, towards the events of a century ago, appear to be largely irreconcilable. Armenians want Turkey to admit to the crimes of genocide. Turkey, however, disputes the events of 1915 and rejects that they should be classified as acts of genocide.

In 1915, the word “genocide” did not exist. On the other hand, there were several key phrases that raised ideas about inhumanity and injustice throughout the written history of democracy.

For example, in 1814 the phrase “principles of natural justice” is used in the Treaty of Paris and the phrase “principles of humanity and justice” is used in the Treaty of Ghent.19 In 1815, the

Declaration of the Powers on the Abolition of the Slave Trade included the phrase “principles of humanity and universal morality” as justification for ending the slave trade.20 In 1860, the National Convention of the American Republican Party issued the statement “…We brand the recent re-opening of the African slave trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity.”21 In 1890, the phrase “crime against humanity” was used to describe the treatment of Africans in the Congo Free State, under King Leopold II of Belgium.22 And during World War I, on May 24, 1915, the Allies, Britain, France and the Russian Empire jointly issued a statement “explicitly announcing, for the first time,”23 the commission of “crimes…against humanity…”24 in response to the Armenian massacres.

After World War I an international war crimes commission attempted to establish a tribunal to try “violations of the laws of humanity,” but the phrase “laws of humanity” was deemed too “imprecise and insufficiently developed” by the US representative and the concept was not pursued.25 While many people worked to recognize the horrors that the Armenian people endured, it took the Armenian massacres along with the scale and magnitude of the First and Second World Wars combined before the world powers realized the urgent need to define wholesale aggression toward a specific people as a “crime against humanity.”

Genocide as a concept and a word was first penned in 194326—two years before the end of World War II and three years before the first General Assembly of the United Nations. The word genocide—from the Greek genos (family, tribe, or race), coupled with a Latin suffix -cide (killing)27—was coined by a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent, Raphael Lemkin, who lost 49 of his relatives to the Holocaust.28 Lemkin studied the Armenian massacres closely while

formulating his concept and while working on his proposal to United Nations about genocide, which recommended establishing the protection of basic human rights under international law.29 The term appeared in print for the first time in Lemkin’s book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in 1944.30 In 1946, the United Nations adopted a resolution affirming that genocide was a crime under international law.31 In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which legally defined the crime of genocide for the first time.32 In 1965, while Armenia was under Soviet control, hundreds of thousands of Armenian people observed the 50th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide in Yerevan—the capital of Armenia today. Despite being a “taboo subject,” and in order to subdue political unrest in what became a “turning point for the Armenians,” the Soviet Government agreed to build a Genocide Memorial, which was completed by 1967.33 Another measure of justice came for Armenia when, in 1991, it finally achieved recognition as an independent republic.

Today, one of the oldest of world cultures and the first Christian nation34 continues its struggle for justice for the victims of the Genocide, while the term genocide continues to inspire research and debate. A notable development in the history of defining the word is Samantha Power’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which “explores America’s understanding of, response to, and inaction on genocides in the 20th century from the Armenian genocide to the ‘ethnic cleansings’ of the Kosovo War.”35 By 2006, several countries had gone on record to recognize the Armenian Genocide—France, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Argentina, and Uruguay, among others—and Armenia, France, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Switzerland36 worked to 15

adopt laws against the denial of the Armenian Genocide, sparking much debate.

While the Kiss the Ground series was designed to raise up into consciousness the atrocities and sobering realities the Armenian people have endured, visitors to the gallery will notice that overt imagery of genocide is not present in the first exhibition—a fact which also raises an important question: What is the subtopic of this first exhibit, this first view of a yearlong exploration?

Memory and Responsibility Gagik Aroutiunian makes art to remember. As he points out: I think who I am as a person—as a human being—a great deal of it comes from my family; the way they brought me up and the values they [instilled] in me. It’s always been sad, the fact that my family doesn’t exist any more. So I feel some responsibility as to telling about the family.37 Thankfully, the Armenian people did not perish after the horrors perpetrated against them a hundred years ago. But that was hardly consolation when Aroutiunian was a child growing up on Armenian-inhabited soil. At that time, Armenia couldn’t possibly foresee its own promise to become a country in its own right. Thus, while global powers continue to work, debate and define the events of nearly a century ago, Armenian families and artists alike have figured many ways to memorialize their stories. Today, much has occurred that is positive and affirming for the Armenians, but much more is yet needed. The work on display in Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground, then, is an embodiment of the artist’s homeland aspirations. It is, as the artist has said, through 16

the build up of bits and pieces that memory sustains what has been lost. In turn, the true place and people endure.

Todd Bartel Gallery Director, Curator Thompson Gallery

____________________ 1. Elliot Baker, The Past Is Not Past—A Drama, 2014, p. 17 2. Gagik Aroutiunian, quoted from an interview by the gallery director, August 29, 2014 3. Aroutiunian email, September 4, 2014 4. Aroutiunian Interview, August 29, 2014 5. Aroutiunian Interview, September, 9, 2014 6. In an interview with Aroutiunian, the artist explains: Tigranakert is the name of city that was founded by Tigran the Great, King of Armenia in the first century. This his King fought against Rome, as the new capital of his kingdom. Nowadays that city which went through many transformations throughout centuries under different empires—Rome, Byzantium, Arabs and Turks—never lost its strong Armenian component and its unique customs specific to the Armenians of that city until it was ended in 1915. In modern days it is known under the name Diyarbakir in Turkey with an overwhelming Kurdish population.

No Armenians exist there (maybe there are a few Islamized hidden ones?), but recently, with efforts of a very progressive Kurdish Mayor of the city, the Armenian church—supposedly the biggest church in the Middle East—was renovated. Email, August 31, 2014 7. Aroutiunian, About House of Memories, 2014, catalog p. 147 8. Philip E. Bishop, ‘Displacement’ Exhibition Evokes Simple Imagery that Speaks Volumes, Special to the Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Orlando, FL, March 5, 2009 9. Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide (Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians), Oxford University Press, New York, 2005, p. 1 10. Henry Morgenthau, The Murder of a Nation, Armenian General Benevolent Union of America, Inc., New York, NY, 1974 11. Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, Holt and Company, LLC, New York, NY, 2006, p. 2-3 12. Akçam, p. 3 13. Akçam, p. 9

14. Aroutiunian email, September 4, 2014 15. Akçam, p. 6 16. Thomas F. Mathews and Roger S. Wieck Eds., Treasures in Heaven—Armenian Illuminated manuscripts, The Pierpont Morgan Library, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 5 NOTE: Mathews, points out: “The origin and early history of the Armenian people remain obscure and controversial because of the near absence of archaeological evidence, and because Armenians did not find their own voice until the creation of a native alphabet in the early fifth century A.D., a millennium after their presumed arrival on the [Anatolian] plateau. As a result of this paucity of direct evidence, and the confused, fragmentary, and often contradictory testimonies of foreign authors, the most that can be said with reasonable certainty is that the Armenoi, an Indo-European speaking group, seem to have filtered gradually into the plateau from the southwest during the seventh to sixth centuries B.C.; their presence is attested there in the late sixth century by both the Greek historian Herodotus and the Bisutun inscription of the Persian king Darius the Great (521-486).”

17. Akçam, p. 8 18. Akçam notes: In line with the argument of necessity, the state claims that the destruction of the Armenians was not the deliberate policy of either the government or the party but ta series of isolated events that occurred, without intention and in the course of harsh wartime conditions, during a :normal” deportation. It remains, however, extremely difficult to explain how 300,000-600,000 people ( the numbers variously cited in official Turkish sources) died within a year—1915—as a result of disease, random attacks, and general wartime conditions while raising no alarm among the central authorities. p. 9 19. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_ humanity#cite_note-3, 9/3/14 20. Ibid. note-4, 9/3/14 21. Ibid. note-5, 9/3/14 22. Ibid. note-5, 9/3/14 23. Ibid. note-6, 9/3/14 24. “…crimes of Turkey against humanity and civilization…”; http://www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.160/current_ category.7/affirmation_detail.html, 9/3/14 25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_against_ humanity#cite_note-7, 9/14/14 26. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Lemkin#cite_note1, 9/3/14 27. Genocide in the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.—”1944 R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe ix. 79 By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group.”

28. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide#cite_ref-18, 9/3/14 29. Author not cited, The California Currier, December 8,

2005, http://npfdinfo.blogspot.com/2007/10/raphaellemkin-discusses-armenian.html, 10/19/14. Note: to view video clip, follow this link: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dzAexRmeZFs 30. Ibid. OED 31. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide#Genocide_as_a_ crime, 9/3/14 32. Ibid, Genocide_as_a_crime 33. Aroutiunian email, September 4, 2014 34. Mathews and Roger S. Wieck Eds., p. xiii 35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Problem_from_Hell, 9/3/14 36. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide_ denial#cite_note-rt.com-121, 9/14/14 37. Aroutiunian interview, August 29, 2014

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Family Portraits

Family Portrait—The Brothers No. 1, 2010 oil paint and transferred photographic image on paper, mounted on canvas 24.5 x 19.5 inches 20

4. Family Portrait—The Family, 2009 oil paint and transferred photographic image on paper, mounted on canvas 25 x 20 inches 21

Lida, 2010 oil paint and transferred photographic image on paper, mounted on canvas 24.5 x 19.5 inches 22

Armine, 2008 oil paint and transferred photographic image on paper, mounted on canvas 24.5 x 19.5 inches 23

Family Portrait—The Brothers No. 2, 2012 oil paint and transferred photographic image on paper, mounted on canvas 24.5 x 19.5 inches 24

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To My Mother

To My Mother—Between Two Stones, 1996 carved marble, welded/fabricated steel, paint, patinas, battery, light bulb, wires, broken ceramic vessel, transferred photographic images 68 x 24 x 24 inches 28

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Father Father

Father, Father, 1997 welded/fabricated steel, paint, patinas, water, battery, electric fan, wires, transferred photographic images 96 x 31 x 31 inches 36

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Traveler and His Road No. 3

Traveler and His Road No. 3, 2000 welded/fabricated steel, patinas, water, battery, electric light, wires, transferred photographic images 78 x 20 x 20 inches 44

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Traveler and His Road No. 4

Traveler and His Road No. 4, 2004 welded/fabricated stainless steel, glass, paint, patinas, water, electric fan, wires, transferred photographic images 78 x 25.5 x 18.5 inches 52

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Artsakh (Wings)

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Artsakh (Wings), 1998 welded/fabricated steel, plastics, paint, patinas, deconstructed found objects, electric fan, wires, TV monitor, DVD player, video, looped DVD, sound 00:09:20 minutes 98 x 58 x 36 inches

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House of Memories

House of Memories, 2014 high definition digital video projection, looped dvd 00:20:20 minutes 70

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House of Memories #1,* 2013 stainless steel frame, fragmented electronic circuitry, polyester resin 17.5 x 10 x 7 inches [*Included in catalog for contextual purposes. Full views of sculptures do not appear in the film.]

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House of Memories #3,* 2013 stainless steel frame, fragmented electronic circuitry, polyester resin 22 x 12.5 x 9 inches 85

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Bird

Bird, 2003 birdcage, looped DVD, projected video 00:06:09 minutes 59 x 19 x 14.5 inches 88

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Exhibition Installation

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Artist’s Statements

About the work The practice of art is like a magic prism through which artists attempt to view and understand themselves and the surrounding world, and which allows them to share and communicate the discoveries made in the process.

My work is about identity, displacement, and memory. Intertwined with this exploration is a fascination with two different entities: the rough, explicit, material quality of object/matter, and the ever-elusive image/illusion that we dream, envision or imagine. Sculptural processes and materials are manifestations of object/matter. Images, video and light, on the other hand, represent illusion. While the first is a primary means for me to represent identity and its displacement, the second is a way to represent memory and its transience. This juxtaposition is consistently present in my work in one form or another.

Many of my pieces integrate photographic images (usually in the form of transfers) as an important component of the piece. I excise images and figures from their original background before placing them in a new, artificially created environment. This artificially created environment in turn heightens the image’s sense of detachment from its setting. However, the process of placing the image in an alien environment also heightens the visual power of the resulting image, freeing it from any pretension of representing reality. The result is a peculiar relationship between the figure and its environment, and the establishment of a new reality.

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About House of Memories House of Memories is an ongoing series in which I use the ruined interior of a house as the primary material source to represent and interpret the fragility and transient nature of individual memory when exposed to the test of time. The house, which belonged to my parents, has been uninhabited for the last twenty years and is in a ruinous state. For me, the space and all the objects in it are linked to the most profound recollections, and yet I can’t help but feel that with the passage of time my memories are deteriorating along with the house itself. Because of this, I have chosen the ruined interior full of decaying, unusable furniture and objects as an allegorical manifestation of the current state of my memories. However, to think of my memories as a deteriorating ruin is unbearable; rather, I prefer to think of the process of memory as a transformation from one state to another, from one condition to another one. As a counterbalance to the grim condition and reality of that interior, therefore, I decided to create abstract structures to serve as a surrogate material translation and representation of specific memories and experiences. These structures are fragile, semi-transparent, and constructed entirely from elements of devices originally used for communication, data storage or image processing (cameras, printers, computers, phones, scanners). These devices have been deconstructed to the point where their elements become devoid of their original purpose, function, and identity, pulverized by force into small particles. With these bits and parts I have created a new, perhaps sad and tense, but nevertheless beautiful image/translation of past experiences and the feelings they evoke.

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Curriculum Vitae

Gagik Aroutiunian

1500 S. Western Ave, Chicago, IL, 60608

http://gagikaroutiunian.com aroutiun@sbcglobal.net

Education 1991 MFA in Sculpture, Towson University, Towson, MD 1987 BA in Painting, Fine Art Studio Specialist Program, University of Toronto, Canada

Solo Exhibitions 2014 Gagik Aroutiunian—Kiss the Ground, Thompson Gallery, The Cambridge School of Weston, Weston, MA

House of Memories, Galeria Kantorek-bwa, Bydgoszcz, Poland Performance: To The Other Side of the Street, Galeria Kantorek-Galeria Miejska bwa, Bydgoszcz, Poland

2009 Displacement, Alice & William Jenkins Gallery, Crealde School of Visual Arts,

Orlando, FL 2005 Recent Work, Gallery Juno, New York, NY 2002 Desire, Tunnel and Wheelchair Harris K. Weston Gallery, Cincinnati, OH,

Recent Work, Gallery Juno, New York, NY 2000 The Carnegie Visual and Performing Arts Center, Covington, KY 1998 Recent Work, Gallery Juno, New York, NY 1996 Recent Work, Gallery Juno, New York, NY

Alice & William Jenkins Gallery, Crealde School of Visual Arts, Orlando, Fl 1994 Recent Work, Gallery Francoise e.s.f., Baltimore, MD

Chesapeake Gallery, Bel Air, MD 1993 Artsakh and Traveler, Canadian Cultural Center in Rome, Rome, Italy 1991 Gallery Francoise e.s.f., Baltimore, MD

Holtzman Gallery, Towson University, Towson, MD 1990 International Sculpture Center at Arnold & Porter, Washington, DC 1982 Artist’s Space at College Park, Toronto, Canada

2001

2013

2011 2010

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Commissions Interactive, 18 foot tall, stainless steel structure with moving components and inscriptions in five languages, commissioned by Xavier University’s Jesuit community and installed in the center of campus, commemorating the inauguration of Michael J. Graham S.J., President of Xavier University Selected Group Exhibitions Juxtaposition: Contemporary Armenian Artists, Denise Bibro Gallery, New York, NY Faculty Show, DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago IL Video Sculpture, DAAP Galleries, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 61st Annual Artists’ Ball, ICO Gallery Chelsea, New York, NY Szkola Bydgoska HALLO!, City Gallery of Bydgoszcz (BWA), Poland Sculpture In The 21st Century, Center For The Arts Gallery, Towson, MD

2010 2008

2007 2006

2005 2004 2003 2002 2001

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1991

1990

Selected Group Exhibitions (continued) Faculty Exhibition, DePaul University Go Figure, Carnegie Visual and Performing Art Center’s Duveneck Gallery, Covington, KY, (two person show) Ritual, Gallery 621 Art Center, Tallahassee, Florida (three person show) Chicago’s Own: Recent Videos by DePaul Art Faculty, Chicago Filmmakers Group show: Sculptors Inc at Columbia Art Center, Columbia, MD Faculty Exhibition, DePaul University Two Artists, FlatFile Gallery, Chicago Inaugural Show of the FlatFile Gallery, Chicago Gallery Artists, Gallery Juno, New York, NY Memoir/Reve, Project Room in FlatFile Gallery, Chicago, IL Untitled, Collaborative Performance with Denise Burge at SSNova Gallery, Cincinnati, OH (two person show) Meyerhoff Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD Century’s End: The American Experience 2000, South Bend Regional Museum of Art, South Bend, IN Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, England Gallery Artists, Gallery Juno, New York, NY Strictly Tactile, Holtzman Gallery, Towson University, Towson, MD Art in the Landscape, Lillian Holt Center for the Arts, Baltimore, MD Artscape 2000 Minus 1, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD Boxed Heads, Video Performance, St. John’s U.M.C., Baltimore, MD Esther Prangley Rice Gallery, Western Maryland College, Westminster, MD The Gallery, Catonsville Community College, Catonsville, MD The Narrative Spirit, Dunedin Fine Art Center, Dunedin, FL The Metaphors of the Tower of Babel, Norman and Sarah Brown Gallery at Jewish Community Center, Baltimore, MD Liriodendron Mansion, Bel Air, MD Stand-Ins, McLean Project for Arts, McLean, VA Biennial 1996, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE Baltimore Sculptors Inc Anniversary show, Mill River Gallery, Ellicott, MD Gallery Artists, Gallery Juno, New York, NY Pulling Time, Performance, St. John’s U.M.C. Two New Artists, Gallery Juno, New York, NY Water Temple, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD Baltimore Sculptors Inc Show, Holtzman Gallery, Towson University, Towson, MD Faculty Show, Temple University’s Gallery in Rome, Rome Italy Burial, Performance, Ponte G. Matteotti, Rome, Italy Gatsby Gallery, Owing Mills, MD Elkton Arts Center, Elkton, MD Life of Maryland Gallery, Baltimore Life Ins. Company, Baltimore, MD City Hall Courtyard Galleries, Baltimore, MD Union Gallery, Towson University, Towson, MD Marlborough Gallery, Prince George’s Community College, Largo, MD 151

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Other Activities Artist Speaker, Armenian Cultural Month, St James Armenian Apostolic Church, Evanston, IL, October 26.

Visiting Artist Speaker, Thompson Gallery, November 15th Visiting Artist Speaker, Displacement: Thirteen Years of Evolution, Crealde School of Visual Arts, Orlando, FL Chaired Session, Reinvented Memory: Contemporary Practices in Art, College Art Association’s Annual Conference in Boston Paper Presentation, Issues in Representation of Genocide and the Holocaust, International Conference on the Arts In Society, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland Paper/Presentation, Displaced Appearances, at the Sixth Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Boca Raton, FL Guest Speaker, Representing Time: Transience in Process, Visiting Artists and Scholars Series, University of Cincinnati, School of Art, Cincinnati, OH Guest Curator for Installation and Performance Art, SoWeBo Art Festival, Baltimore, MD Guest Panelist, Forum Discussion on Performance Art, Fells Point Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD

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Selected Reviews and Bibliography House of Memories, exhibition catalog by Stanislaw Stasiulewicz.

Kiss the Ground, exhibition catalog, Thompson Gallery ASA 61st Annual Artists’ Ball, exhibition catalog, New York HALLO Project, exhibition catalog, Bydgoszcz, Poland Philip E. Bishop, Simple Images Speak Volumes—Displacement: Sculptures and Installations by Gagik Aroutiunian, Orlando Sentinel, Orlando, FL Terry Hummel, Sculptures as Metaphors, Orlando Sentinel, Orlando, FL Henrik Igityan, Armenian Palette-New Generation (Yerevan: Tigran Metz, 2006), pages 224 - 233, 365, (Henrik Igityan is founder and director of Museum of Contemporary Art in Yerevan, Armenia) Art Review, Gagik Aroutiunian’s Video Assemblages and Their Tacit Contents, The Armenian Reporter International (New York), July 9 I Morti and desire TUNNEL + Wheelchair, Dialogue Magazine, Jan/Feb Steve Ramos, Projected Life, City Beat, Cincinnati, OH, October 3 Fran Watson, Putting you in Art, City Beat, Cincinnati, OH, April 20 Julie York, American Travels, South Bend Tribune, May 14 John Dorsey, Bold Choices Make Strong Solid Show, The Baltimore Sun, Nov. 24 Joanne Milani, Artistic Tales, Tampa Tribune, March 20 Ferdinand Protzman, Art and Soul, The Washington Post, December 28 Philip Bishop, Sculptures are Steps in Haunting Journey: Gagik Aroutiunian’s The Traveler and His Road Shares the Exiled Artist’s Personal Odyssey, The Orlando Sentinel, September 29

1996

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1991

Sue di Pasquale, In the Studio with Gagik Aroutiunian, John’s Hopkins Magazine 48, n. 4, September John Dorsey, Artists Test the Limits of Abstract Sculpture, The Baltimore Sun, January 13 John Dorsey, Works by Two Stand Out in ‘Off the Wall’ Exhibit, The Baltimore Sun, March 14

1990

1989

Selected Reviews and Bibliography (continued) John Dorsey, Sculpture of Found Objects is Touching, The Baltimore Sun, October 23 John Dorsey, Five Sculpture Shows but Few Sculptors, The Baltimore Sun, June 6 John Dorsey, Unknown Sculptor Captures Attention, The Baltimore Sun, September 19

2002

1991

Academic Appointments to present, Associate Professor, Department of Art and Media, DePaul University, Chicago IL to present, teach at the following institutions: Temple University in Rome, Rome, Italy Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD Towson University, Towson, MD University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD

2000

1995

Media Appearances Featured in King Gimp, directed by William Whiteford (King Gimp received an Academy Award in 2000 for Best Documentary Short Subject) Show Cable 10, TV interview (20 minutes), February 1, Toronto, Canada

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