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Artist statement
I reimagine and respond to various situations with videos and photos primarily in my art practice.
Some of these situations include those related to urban fabric, post-Soviet urban space, baffling realities, and non-places. According to French anthropologist Marc Augé, non-places are non-relational, non-historical, non-identity related, and built for transit purpose.
My usual approach is to observe what's out there, reflect on chosen observations and related sentiment, research, explore how I can respond, and make my responses.
But I also experiment with approaches and processes as I view them as being just as important as the final work.
In participatory projects, I not only involve people as equal collaborators to create art-as-shared-experiences but also flip the script at times by inviting people I know or strangers in the streets to offer inputs that shape the final work.
For example, in a Yerevan-based project aimed at re-imagining the urban walk guide, I asked strangers in cafes, streets, and parks to identify both their favorite places and the ones they found annoying—and, importantly, why.
Those inputs collected guided me to the production of a walk guide for Yerevan—titled Clues for City Wandering, with the input contributors acknowledged.
The process of inviting input from people reflects, I believe, the fact that art is not created in a vacuum. It is much like real life—influenced by many things, including encounters with people who provide input in various ways, whether or not they realize they’re doing so.