Amsterdam. Dissolving the visible, making the invisible visible. Those terms could well be applied to sketch out the approach the French-Armenian artist Melik Ohanian has adopted in his (video) installations for a good five years now. The exhibition in de Appel, Amsterdam, which gives a synoptic overview of these works, is the second show of this type, following on from Ohanian’s solo exhibition in Villeurbanne, France in early 2006, strikingly demonstrates how deftly the artist presents a staging of visibility mechanisms. As indicated by the title »Somewhere in Time«, the central focus here is on time images set within spatial coordinates – time images characterised above all by the densely intense manner in which they deal with heterogeneous, sometimes conflicting forms of visuality. At the same time however the form of the installation itself emerges reflexively from the material chosen as the starting point.
This can be seen for example in »Invisible Film« (2005), where radical post-sixties cinema is brought back into visual memory – without actually being shown as such. To be more precise, in the video projection we see a film projector standing in the Californian desert beaming Peter Watkins’ rarely screened docu-fiction »Punishment Park« (1971) into the dully flickering night sky. The sound track is preserved as a text shown in parallel on a flat screen, in other words, in the locus in which Watkins once staged his landmark work on USA political repression, which is now in a sense given back to the film. Yet at the price of being rendered invisible, which on the one hand indicates that the work had disappeared from public consciousness for a long stretch of time. On the other hand it also marks the void of the historical latency period between the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s and the virtually non-existent resistance to the new US imperialism.
A similar obliteration, which at the same time constitutes a kind of meta-visualization, is effected in »Hidden« (2005). A large-format projection shows a static image of a Texan oilfield, glowing replete in the red glow of dusk. Alongside this, columns of cryptic figures and symbols scroll over a computer monitor. The accompanying description claims that the visible image carries another within it, namely a shot of an oilfield in Baku, Azerbaijan, encoded in the starting material via a process known as steganography. That is something we clearly cannot check up on – just like the alleged use of this technique by terrorist organisations after 11th September 2001. Once again Ohanian repeatedly offers a staging of an information and visuality mechanism that has become omnipresent: efforts are constantly made to convince us that we are surrounded by conspiratorial secret messages, whilst universal suspicion has long taken the place of confirmed knowledge. This once again brings us back to pure –unknowing yet suspicious - contemplation, even if only of a kitsch flat sunset above a monotonously toiling oil pump.
Ohanian also extinguished the colour of the Texan flag which – neutralised into a monochrome white – is hanging at half-mast over de Appel’s roof terrace. It is fixed to an aluminium rod that cuts through three storeys and thus creates a spatial link, as does the staircase (with steps clad in mirrors) or the neon lettering spread over several rooms (for example »G(HOST)« or (M)UT(E)OPIA«). The connection between here, there and nowhere is also picked up in the installation »Island of an Island, comment« (2003), made up of a photograph of the Icelandic volcanic island Surtsey, which came into being in 1963, and its distorted reflection in a convex mirror mounted on the ceiling. The island off an island evokes the general notion of the careful preparation of scientific facts – Surtsey now serves as a popular research biotope –, yet is also demonstratively dislocated by Ohanian through the prism of purportedly isolated forms of reproduction (photo, text, mirror image). »T(HERE)« appears on the wall not far from the installation, and the divided nature of the moment (or rather of the representation) appears not only in this island work but also runs through a welter of other pieces.
It appears again for example in Ohanian’s best-known work, »The Hand« (2002), in which the »inactive« hands of nine unemployed Armenian workers, spread over nine monitors, clap in various (poly)rhythms, whilst their biographical backgrounds are presented as texts on the wall. Finally, the elliptic film narrative »Seven Minutes Before« is shown on seven screens set next to each other; this was originally produced for the São Paulo Biennale 2004 and shown in Amsterdam in DeïsKa, which has much more space available than de Appel. »Seven Minutes Before«, entirely set in a rural context, turns around the problematic of being at home in a global world that appears increasingly devoid of homelands. »Where I make things happen – that’s where I belong«, the main protagonist raps, whilst obdurate shots of landscapes and fragments of action reveal a strange eloquence. The only question is what kind of a cosmos is being inscribed onto our retinas here – for ultimately unadorned values of display dominate, consistently stripped of the fundament of legibility. And as a consequence, the visible once again appears as evidence of the invisible.
Translated by Helen Ferguson