Haig Aivazian at The Showroom
Haig Aivazian’s first UK solo exhibition consists of two movies, every of which collages collectively discovered materials from a dizzying vary of sources—tech-bro TED talks, Georgian indie bands, telephone footage of police violence, Tintin—tracing a tangle of connections between sport and warfare, energy and revenue, surveillance, spectacle and state-sanctioned homicide. Mild and hearth are operating motifs: Aivazian asks what will get lit up and why, who will get to see and who’s all the time being watched.
Prometheus, 2019, revisits the 1992 Olympic Video games in Barcelona within the aftermath of the Gulf Battle, a battle that, Baudrillard famously argued, didn’t happen. Footage of American basketball gamers bowing on the rostrum cuts to a picture from the 2003 invasion of Iraq: the much-mythologized toppling of the large statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Each Baudrillard and Aivazian are drawn, repeatedly, to mild, as know-how and as metaphor. The “megalomaniac mild present” the thinker describes is conjured by the artist in a single deft lower from Disney’s Aladdin (1992), wherein a service provider hurls sparks into the darkness (a complete historical past of orientalism advised in just some seconds), to video footage of night-time gunfire.
Protesting current energy outages throughout Lebanon, a results of endemic corruption, Your entire Stars are however Mud on my Footwear, 2021, is extra modern and extra ambitiously ecological. Aivazian dances from the homicide of whales for oil, to entwined histories of public lighting and police violence, to the newest data-driven applied sciences of management. A light-weight map charts a historical past of destruction and loss in Syria. Protestors have smartphones now. Aivazian finds patterns in every single place. Rigorously researched and dextrously woven from a mass of fabric, the 2 movies represent a speculative, against-the-grain cartography of resistance towards the injustices of absolutist abstractions.
— Tom Jeffreys
