CONSEQUENCE: ARTEFACT
“Consequence: Artefact” project aims to offer an alternative discourse where the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will be considered from a different perspective that reveals not the political, economic or social consequences but the traces of the conflict along the line of contact. Edik Boghosian and Areg Balayan, search for and select material evidences related to the conflict, and transform them into works of art.
Consequence: Artefact is a multidisciplinary project, which was initiated by Edik Boghosian. The exhibition held on the Artists’ Union of Armenia from 08-28 february, 2020, Yerevan.
War does not end, so that peace could start. War gets silent, retreats, nestles in the limited vocabulary of politicians, diplomats, mediators and their mediators. War is hiding itself in the absence of those perished and, in often greedy, sometimes self-recreating stories of those that are accidentally (perhaps accidentally) alive. There is no action in the landscape. Landscape is a testimony of peace. The mountain is in its place, the tree is in its place, the grass is green or scorched, the track is narrow and serpentine, the piece of cloud is ready to weep.
As if nothing happened. There are no details on the horizon. What a peace! But try to advance, try to approach the mountain, set your foot on the narrow track, go under the shadow of the tree and the war speaks to you in a inoffensive, unthreatening tone, speaks as one will tell about themselves, in the past tense, but filling the area with their presence. And suddenly your eyes catch a man grazing his sheep behind a tree (you wonder who that might be), then an armored car, lying on the side like a corpse of a horse, you don’t lose sight of a nearby house’s gate covered with machine gun bullet holes either, you can’t overlook a single household detail. Consequence…! Won’t the peace be living its own life, won’t it be appeased by its inner peace, and won’t it be captivated by its own beauty? Is the consequence the impossibility of peace which pushes for riot, vengeance, grief, irreconcilability, revenge and retribution? What to do in this landscape? Where to go? How to hide so that the consequence won’t chase you? Artist Edik Boghosian and photographer Areg Balayan seem to have succeeded in answering these extremely complex questions.
Tigran Paskevichyan