Lyon Biennale 2017
Support to the artist Melik Ohanian’s project.
On the occasion of the 2017 Lyon Biennale, the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard confirms its commitment to the French scene. In collaboration with Cineparts and Chantal Crousel gallery, the Fondation supports the project of the artist Melik Ohanian.
About the Biennale:
Since its creation in 1991, Thierry Raspail, Artistic Director of the Biennale de Lyon, has asked each guest curator to think about a keyword, assigned for three editions. The 2017 Biennale de Lyon is the second volume of a trilogy around the word « modernity », and it was with this word that Thierry Raspail invited Emma Lavigne, director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz, to imagine this 14th edition, at the Sucrière and macLYON from 20 September 2017 to 07 January 2018.
About Melika Ohanian:
Between science, philosophy, astrophysics and visual arts, Melik Ohanian explores and, in various media, transcends the material aspect of the work. Ohanian takes inspiration from various film techniques and contemporary projection techniques to work on the status of the image and the concept of time. For the Biennale, Melik Ohanian gives us a new project, a blend of film, choreography, temporality and architecture: “Those to-ings and fro-ings of time, those reminders of the past, those projections into the future, or the recall to the present, – they are the permanent state in which each one of us lives our private life. Sometimes in my work, the past takes precedence, sometimes anticipation does. Perhaps an exhibition is a matter of finding a certain stability in time …” Melik Ohanian
Borderland – I Walked a Far Piece
Melik Ohanian’s work Borderland – I Walked a Far Piece is conceived in a marginal, de-territorialised territory, on a floating New York rooftop, lit by a nocturnal bonfire: the fascinating experience of a representation disconnected from time, filmed in a workers’ camp in Sharjah, in two sequences, a new huis clos. Bordeland is an open stage on which the artist presents characters from Rudolf Wurlitzer’s novel Flats, leaving them to get on with their lives in the present, mingling their travellers’ tales with those of other characters, migrants whom no one wants to take in anymore. Over the course of a single night, when the lights of the electric city seem to have gone out, Melik Ohanian weaves a resonant tapestry of fragmented rhythms, Beat poetry and the nomadic lives of these celestial vagrants.
