Melik Ohanian

NIGHTSNOW

1er juin — 31 août 2002

Under the generic title NIGHTSNOW, Melik Ohanian articulates his first gallery exhibition with six works and a full palette of media.

Switch Off, 2002
A simple action that modifies - the state of a street, of a building, of a public space. That alters a moment and one’s perception.

Switch Off consists of a large light box, containing a b/w photography of the globe. On top of this synthetic image – a recomposition by computer of the world at night, produced by the NASA – a zillion of light dots reproduces the electric lighting used all over the planet. By means of a button, the viewer can commute this vision of the plane world into a constellation: 'The Sculptor's Studio’ (one of the solar system’s most remote constellations).

Stretching Picture, 2002
Figures an Oriental sign, adapted and transferred by the Occident. By means of a transparent adhesive image on the gallery window, this sign transforms the room, stretching both space and time. It acts as a filter.

Freezing Film, 2002
Succeeds to ‘Coming Soon’, 2001, presented at the exhibition Traversées, ARC, Paris. Whereas ‘Coming Soon’ – including the physical presence of William J. Clancey, Engineer at the NASA, approached the subject of the planet Mars in a scientific manner, Freezing Film presents a more playful device. Its elegant concrete structure, halfway between a ping-pong table and a skateboard half pipe, invites the viewer to sit or lay down and watch a moving picture. The images from Mars, forwarded by the satellite Viking, have been collected from the net and animated in order to establish autonomous travelling around the planet. A sub-titling text passes simultaneously. In order to read this text, the viewer has to push a button that freezes the image and gives access to the text. By doing so, the ‘public/utopian’ film returns the images to where they were taken from: so far, so close, within reach of our imagination.

Nightsnow, 2001
A short film shot during a voyage in Iceland (preparing the installation ’Island of an Island’ for the Palais de Tokyo). Sensing a snowstorm to approach, Melik Ohanian places his camera at a snow-clad square. Two street-lamps light this strange place. (The orange glow immediately brings to mind Stretching Picture, Freezing Film). The wind brushes up the snow in circular movements. Little by little, the objective gets covered with snow and de-focalizes this readily unreal image- a doubled reality.

Selected Recording #005, 2000
A color photograph that seems to signify the unlikeness of territories. A striking counterpoint in the present articulation of works that rather claims a wider world, in which borders would not have been decided by men.

Men are scarce in this exhibition. The Hand, 2002, brings the exception.
Nine pairs of hands, filmed individually, compose a fragmented image. This composition provokes a straightforward perception of un-employment. Beyond any political confrontation, those unemployed hands suddenly get animated Along with the rhythmic Melik Ohanian proposes them, they create a new collective time.