Sonia BALASSANIAN

My images are intuitive explorations of the culture, which have profoundly affected me.
In one video, where a naked man plunges into an underground hole only to re-emerge, and to sink again, I sense a kind of rebirth linked/related to the Armenian saga. In the other video, I recall memories of scenes of self-flagellation I witnessed as a child growing up in Iran.
These symbolic actions, gestures and rituals, echo the preoccupations, which persist in my psyche.

 

Atom EGOYAN

I found it curious that footage from Elia Kazan's epic movie America, America showing the burning of on Armenian church, seemed to gain power by abstracting it—by slowing it down and increasing its murkiness. I found this to be a disturbingly provocative act, as though I was re-appropriating my own imagined experience of the horror by distorting the Hollywood version (which is, of course, a distortion in itself).
Does this work? Can a personal, completely conjectured experience be twisted from a secondary source? To heighten the questions I hove counter-pointed my visual manipulations with some home movie footage I shot during an April 24 rally in Ottawa in 1985. This rally was to make the Canadian government aware and recognize the history that Elia Kazan depicts in his film. Again, because of the nature of the home movie images, there seems to be a dichotomy between the almost celebratory energy of the rally, and the gravity or the history it attempts to address.
This film composition is projected over a video segment—A Portrait of Arshile—which is a meditation on my son's name played over a video image of his face, as well as images from Arshile Gorky's famous painting “The Artist and His Mother”. The video finishes with Gorky's mother staring into the camera, staring from a gallery wall into a land she never dreamed of.

Arman GRIGORIAN

Being weak does not mean being annihilated. If I want to depart into solitude from where the wolves rule, it does not mean that I am pessimistic or hove negative attitude towards life. To the contrary, for me victors and defeated do not exist. What I am trying to state is that my work is of no use, except for the fact that it is of no use, and even then only temporarily, I reap things off my paintings, and waste them.
Traditional forms of expression hove different meanings today. They are different; they are not what they were. I want to take the myth out of the new media, the video, the electronic communications, etc; I wont to destroy the myth of power of the media and advertisement. If they had the power they are conceived to have, the Soviet Union would persist today. It does not.
Because of destroying of my own work, some characterize me as a violent person. But isn't the moon the surface where all our dreams are perched? Let this—my work—be another project in the dead field. May be that dead field is the art itself.
I wont to predict, but no that which will necessarily happen. Instead, I use prediction as satire, a joke. This is why I like the popular art. These days everything has to be mixed with some degree of spontaneity, with satire, with fun.

Azat SARKISSIAN

Each generation writes anew, and in certain way re-lives the past. The new is born from the past, but it cannot be explained by the post. Therefore, new present requires new past, with which it can find itself in rational rapport. Thus, past and the future are oriented towards the present. What we need is the significance of the present. We can find it in a past, which is needed because of the unique nature of the pre sent, and in such a future, towards which it con lead itself.
Therefore, history emerges as a tool, through which the entire body of facts, which represent this or the other society, are legitimized. It is the explanation of the past in terms of the present, as it is the explanation of the present in terms of the Post.
The entire reality exists only in the present. Now, and here. But the past and the future are dissections of circumstances outside their existential boundaries, before and after.

Stepan VERANIAN

My thoughts, and my work, develop not as much by logical process, but by a musical one. After irregular and erratic parallels, appears a strong relationship of leitmotifs and repeated themes.
It is of this point that I see the silhouette of a series of contradictions, which creates tension in the spiritual and social field, a field where my mind often wonders.
Some of these contradictions are society, its structure, group, cast, unity, communications; poetic work and work done to order, artistic action, existential and artistic reality...
I chose community, unity and communication; poetic work and artistic action; artistic reality...
This selection is not coincidental. It is a principle. A principle, which lays the grounds for unifying those spiritual values, which have been created in the past, in the present, and I hope in the future.
Motion assumes relocation, and relocation gives birth to spatial impression...