BREATHING CITY
LILITH MNATSAKANYAN solo exhibition
Curated by NPAK Team
The moving windows are dizzying…
Yerevan is like a Rubik’s cube. It is constantly being dismantled and assembled, and so am I…
The city is a topic.
I think this topic about the city is not accidental. Every day, the first view that opens from the window is the city. The streets of the city take one to the places belonging to it with its own rhythm. Along the way, the city is destroyed, repaired, transformed and assembled. At certain times, the nerves of the city are stretched, in order to increase the desire to visit other cities, the veins of the city are blocked by its own residents and the pressure rises to 180 mm Hg, the speed of the car passing through the square exceeds the pressure, and at the same time, the subway swallows thousands of people with the appetite of a leviathan and because of the bitter mood of people the leviathan spits out them at the terminal station, where a new gray mass rushes to a newly built building that does not belong to them for other fifteen years…
The city is a question.
Let’s imagine that the city is a collection of “places to show” where values, thoughts, ideas and principles are reflected. Ugliness, abandonment, separation, escape become the main narratives to describe and animate the modern city.
The city itself is a narrative, “a text based on a grammar of spatial patterns and meaningful structures” (T. Jachna, Cyburban Semiotics, Split 2004).
In the text of the city, you can “read” the pictures on the walls, the names of the streets, the shop windows, the views from the windows, people’s conversations, memories, emotions and ways of expression. While “reading” the windows of the opposite building, the lights start to move first to the right with the movement of the eyes, then they go down to the next floor to move to the right again. The windows slowly pile up on each other and seem to fall on your head.
The city is a text.
If the city is a text (K. Lynch, The Image of the City: Cambridge, MA 1960), how to read it here in the space of art. If the city is a “pseudo-text” (Gottdiener, Lagopoulos), can it turn into a “real” text by becoming a subject and image of art? Thinking about these questions begins with Lilith’s cityscapes, which are narratives by themselves, they are connected with the artist’s memory, feelings, emotions and ideas. The works included in the exhibition become the result of the artist’s imagination.
The city is an imagination.
“Imagination” acquires another meaning: turning into an image. We are now dealing with a new city, which is “imagined” based on narratives torn from the real city.
The city is an image.
The artist breaks down the grammar of the real city and collects them through images in the art space.
Thus, the signs that direct the artist to read the city as disintegrating-assembling, fragmented, fleeing, oppressive… exist only in the imagination and are depicted in all possible forms of the sign system: text, symbol, image, picture.
The city is a dialogue.
Thanks to the depiction of the artist, the city turns into an object that enters into a conversation with the observer, which transfers and communicates with the observer through the text and symbols encoded in it.
Perhaps what the observer will see at the exhibition will make them think about the city as a collection of signs, or it will cause incompatibility between the artist’s depiction and the observer’s imagination, or will create an opportunity to think about new meanings of familiar signs.
The city is a meaning.
M.A.
2023