Artist statement
I reimagine and respond to various situations with videos and photos primarily in my art practice.
Some of these situations include those related to urban fabric, post-communist urban space, "sensitive and baffling realities" that might be dangerous to talk about explicitly, and non-places, which, according to French anthropologist Marc Augé are non-relational, non-historical, non-identity related, and built for transit purpose.
My usual approach is to observe what's out there, reflect on chosen observations and related sentiment, research, explore how I can respond, and make my responses.
But I also experiment with approaches and process because I see them as equally important as the final work.
In participatory projects, I not only involve people as equal collaborators to create art-as-shared-experiences but also flip the script at times by inviting people I know or strangers in the streets to give me inputs that guide me to the creation of a final work.
For example, in a project that I did in Yerevan, Armenia to re-imagine the nature of an urban walk guide and the making of it, I asked strangers whom I met in cafes, streets, and parks the locations of their favorite places/spaces and places/spaces they find annoying as well as why.
Those inputs collected guided me to the production of a walk guide for Yerevan—titled Clues for City Wandering, with the input contributors acknowledged.
The process of inviting inputs from people, I believe, reflects the fact that art is not created in a vacuum—it’s rather like real life, which is influenced by many things, including encounters with people who give others inputs in different ways, whether they are aware of having done so.