After You Sir

(Installation/ mixed media, performance)

In the Group Show “Empty Signs”.

Center of Contemporary Experimental Art, May 2008, Yerevan, Armenia.

Curators: Sona Balasanyan, Edward Tadevosyan

In the installation, on dummy doors lined up in a horizontal row inscriptions are  placed with the names of the most well-known award ceremonies and order initiation ceremonies of the ones, who were distinguished in the spheres of science, politics and culture with the list of prestigious international festivals: the  Legion of Honour, Order of Knighthood Ceremony, la Biennale di Venezia, Nobel Prize Ceremony, Cannes Film Festival, the American Cinematography Academy Award Ceremony, the  “Oscar”.

The installation, shining by purity of its performance, is called to re-create the pompousness and glamorous profusion of these ceremonies with unalterable red carpet for ceremonial processions and with shine of nickel-coated rods, fencing off the future nominees from the onlookers – the mere mortals.

All symbolical row of installation is referring to the idea of “simulakr”-s the signs – imitations, which had lost any reality whatsoever, and are only simulating it. The installation is called to serve as a sort of a composite model of the world, which is transformed, by the artists opinion, into a collection of seemings (outward appearances), imaginary things, where the art is being engaged more and more in simulation of the creative process: many artistic works are often appearing as empty signs, representative forms, with loss of referee. 

The spectators [viewers], the human beings had stopped to be the ones, instead of them an appraiser, an arbitrator had arrived, who is reading out   “the coefficient of efficiency” generated by commodity circulation of signs of culture, arts. The pure and empty forms exhibited in the project mean, that many meanings in the modern world are in disconnection from their primary goals and are directed towards, applied for the purposes of prestige, status differentiation.

The performance, connected to the installation, imitating in a form of a game the crowd of the journalists, paparazzi, TV crews, who are shooting, recording and interviewing the emptiness, is enhancing the idea of simulation.