Registered: November 2007 Location: Armenia,Yerevan users gallery
Artistic project entitled “Human Doors” consists of multi-imaged photo-objects/human bodies installed in space and a video entitled “Inter-est.”
In the project the artist has expressed the space of bodily figurativeness as an alternative “public sphere” in which through artistic expression not only does the gender discourse get revived but also the discourse of sex exclusions is actualized. The installment itself turns into a model of “majority” figure-objects who appeared as enveloped in their own subjectivity and caught by “gender trouble.” 1 Pictured in “troubled” dynamic each figure appears as the carrier of the truth of a concrete character which can easily be linked to this or that subjectivity. Problematized are also the idea of self-identification and possibility of individual emotional mechanism of the Self when the latter is compelled to continuously deal with the system of limits, oppressions, discoursed gender politics, sexual exclusions and all other cultural and social taboos arising from them.
Each photo-object presses a strange for the spectator object against its genitals. It is a mechanical metallic door cubeh (Persian word denoting the object with which one knocks on the door). In the past these cubehs were used to knock on the doors and to recognize the gender of the visitor. The cubehs had either the form of a penis or vagina. They were installed on the gates and doors of private and public buildings in Iran. One can still see them in the country although today they have lost their original purpose giving away to new technology.
The epistemological effect of using the abovementioned cubehs as an instrument for understanding sex has some subordination in the project. The biological sex is subordinated to the social and cultural order. The sexual differentiation is a result of and is manifestly connected to the social and is subjected to a higher power – the “law of heterosexuality. Taken from this perspective, the gendered cubehs are the Center to which the figure-objects are “stuck” suggesting that everything and everyone is controlled by the phallus (phallocentrism).
The fragmented, fluid and instable aspects of sex and sexual embodiment in the “Human Doors” include one more aspect of the postmodern culture – the new restrictions in subjectivity through the “machine.” This aspect is presented in the video work entitled “Inter-est.”2 In the imaginary world pictured in the video one can see the artist’s allusion on the biopolitics of the body which finds a way out, gets free of the social and cultural constructs through the technical, through the Webs.
The so-called cyber-romanticism so widely spread in our days marks the human beings role play in the internet in which the unclear category of “real life” is mixed up with a more unreal virtual stimulation for the construction of ones own Self. In the virtual space the person is free to construct and deconstruct identities, “desire machines,” relationships, space, time and gender.
The artist places the photo-objects and video work in spaces which are linked and yet separated from one another by a wall. The narratives in both sides of the space shout desperateness. It is as though all subjectivities (“subjects” in the “history of sex” presented in the project get “power” instruction that belonging to one’s own gender is the real “healthy” act par excellence because there is no possibility to create other histories to help people achieve a larger unity!?
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in the “history of sex” presented in the project get “power” instruction that belonging to one’s own gender is the real “healthy” act par excellence because there is no possibility to create other histories to help people achieve a larger unity!?