The Continuous Line that Binds us to Each Other
Curated by Sona Stepanyan
Curated by Sona Stepanyan, Firetti Contemporary presents The Continuous Line that Binds us to Each Other, a group exhibition of three women artists, Sawsan Al Bahar, Annie Kurkdjian and Nazik Armenakyan. These artists reveal historical and current actual socio-political contexts of their native Armenia, Lebanon, and Syria via sensual allegorical images and personal narratives embedded in mediums of photography, painting, and drawings. An important common feature of their artistic practice becomes a will for liberation and a decline of falling victim to existing rules and conventions. As a result, sharp, sincere visual statements arise in which artists bring to the surface and establish eye contact with one's deep inner unconscious — fear, shame, guilt, sexuality, despair, and pry.
In a series of portraits, Sawsan Al Bahar often plays a dual role as both the subject and the object of her reflections. Fragmented and distorted digital sketches regain their physical presence in large-scale drawings and collages. In an attempt to restore and preserve the memory of her family's forced replacement from Palestine to Syria and later to UAE, the artist draws back again and again to meticulously detailed images of objects, people, and situations by upbringing her hand to automatism and training her bodily physical memory. Reassembled from the digital collective often via Google views, the artworks emphasise the fragmentary nature of knowledge and truth, the incompleteness of history, and the alienation of generations.
The grotesque and vulnerable subjects of Annie Kurkdjian's works often appear simultaneously in the artist's deliberately surreal canvases filled with anxiety and melancholy. Kurkdjian forms tremulous and piercing images that closely echo her life and emotional experience at the time of their creation. Two canvases explicitly commissioned for this exhibition depict the late artistic style and are centred around the image of a woman, motherhood, sisterhood, solidarity, and support.
Nazik Armenakyan stages stories of several women's destinies that have changed dramatically due to the diagnosis of HIV, often acquired in marriage. By building trusting relationships and going through her doubts and fears, the artist gives voice to silent models and social injustice entangled with tradition, cultural codes, patriarchy, and the lack of choice. Images shot on 120 mm film and Hasselblad camera with a long exposure metaphorically lengthen the ringing silence of women and emphasise the courage of their decision to be seen.
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