HAIG AIVAZIAN

In March 2024, Haig Aivazian came to collaborate with Jazmine Catasús on two sets of copperplates Beacons and Pillars (2024) for his New York solo exhibition at Brief Histories - the works will travel to the 60th Venice Biennale representing Cyprus.

Works will be later editioned on paper.

Beacon and Pillars I, 2024 | Etching on Hahnemühle| Diptych; Each Sheet 45 x 35 inches | Edition: 13

I go to sleep, but sleep doesn’t come to me, an exhibition by Haig Aivazian puts in relation past works with fragments of upcoming lines of inquiry that explore night as a space of alternating configurations of social visibility. In a loop, alternating between video, sound and sculpture, the works inhabit various irreconcilable contradictions, ambiguities, and double agencies.

In the black and white animated video You May Own the Lanterns, but We Have the Light, Episode 1, (2022); and the audio piece I Go to Sleep, but Sleep Doesn’t Come to Me (2023) composed by Noise Diva (Yara Said) for the upcoming episode 2 , Aivazian considers the often sticky ambivalence between dancing as an act of collective resistance and dancing on graves in oblivious bliss. In a series of engraved copper plates, Beacons and Pillars (2024), produced in residency at the Robert Blackburn Print workshop (EFA-RBPW) with master printer Jazmine Catasús,Aivazian continues his long-standing work with found imagery, cropping out and reproducing etchings of torch bearers and smoke from colonial expedition illustrations. It is unclear whether the torches are beacons leading masses into the light, or burning and looting in the name of so-called civilization. Laser lights and smoke in the exhibition space stir further ambiguity, collapsing elements from the nightclub, the street and the war-zone.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from an Iraqi mawwalin the voice of an amorous insomniac who wonders: “How can I sleep when I am in this state? My heart is wrapped around a dagger.” Aivazian adapts this sentiment to echo a state of political vigilance in the face of mass denialism. - Press Release from Brief Histories Gallery

Beacon and Pillars II, 2024 | Etching on Hahnemühle| Diptych; Each Sheet 45 x 35 inches | Edition: 13

about

Haig Aivazian is an artist and a writer, born in 1980 in Beirut and currently based there. Using performance, video, drawing, installation and sculpture, his work weaves together personal and geopolitical, micro and macro narratives in its search for ideological loopholes and short circuits.He delves into the ways in which power embeds, affects, and moves people, objects, animals, landscape, and architecture. Aivazian explores apparatuses of control and organization in sports, museums, the office, music and anywhere else they may be at work.

He is a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alumnus and has received an MFA from Northwestern University, Evanston, US, and a BFA from Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. From 2020 to 2022, Aivazian was Artistic Director of Beirut Art Center (BAC) where he was founding editor of thederivative.org, among several other projects he initiated.

His work has been presented in the Yokohama Triennial (2020), Marrakesh Biennial (2016), Montreal Biennial (2016), Istanbul Biennial (2015), Venice Biennale (2015), and Videobrasil, Sao Paulo (2013, 2017), and exhibited at Swiss Institute, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Home Works 8, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; Nottingham Contemporary, UK; MAXXI, Rome; McaM, Shanghai; and Kadist, Paris; among other museums and galleries. He is currently Artistic Co-Director of the Beirut Art Center.