Gohar Martirosyan is a conceptual and performance artist currently living and working in Armenia. She is our featured artist this week on the HAYP/IN SITU “Virtual Viewing Room” platform, a space for online artworks from June 1 – August 2, 2020. In this interview, we learn a little more about Gohar’s project and what inspires her as an artist. Scroll down to the very bottom for a complete bio.
HAYP/ IN SITU: Tell us about your VVR project, “Presence”.
Gohar Martirosyan: My research started from communication: what is really missing in our communication and how to improve it. It’s well known that we are living in an age of over consumption of information, and we live our lives jumping from one event to another. It’s how we try to blur our inner suffering, and events become our behavior. We get more and more individualistic and isolated and we translate our communication via a language of ego sublimation.
Related to that, [my work] questions how a physical dimension is necessary to create healthy communication. It’s in part related to the Corona Virus, but I think we were in the same state even before. I’m talking about the body, and trying to see if it can be a solution or not. It’s mostly an open question: do we need to share presence or consciousness?
Monsters, a series of digital drawings on analogue photographs taken of the city of Gyumri, empty in the wake of confinement.
HI: How does this relate to your artistic practice?
GM: My artistic approach is to talk about common issues via my personal experience. I think it’s the only way to talk about something from a hidden point of view, and to reveal the abandoned side of the conflict. I think that we are a product of social and common memory. We are created for sure by our societies. So each of us is a module of society, which is why I take myself as a product of experiment. First of all, I practice on my own self.
HI: What do you mean by abandoned side of a conflict?
GM: I’m inspired by inner conflict and external conflict. I’m looking for the side that is missing, and I try to bring it out via my practice to show a more complete picture. That’s what inspires me.
HI: What does confinement mean to you? Have you (re)discovered something during this time?
I discovered that we should invent new media to communicate with one another, and I think that in some way it’s the mission of art as well. For example, when we remove vision, like if we cannot see each other, we replace it with imagination. And our imagination becomes stronger in order to compensate [for lack of sight]. I think we become more sensitive to each other and somehow the distance makes us see more clearly. I don’t want to call it Telepathy, but it’s something where we enter a new dimension and we explore it, and we’ve all became explorers. That’s what I really appreciate during this time.
HI: When you’re not making art, what do you enjoy the most?
GM: What do I enjoy the most….? Hmm…actually, I think that for each person, to work on what he really likes – what makes him happy or what is pleasant for him – that is the really hard work. And I think we should reveal for each of us what we really want from this life. That’s what I enjoy doing. I love to discover what can make me satisfied, and I like the idea of purification, because when we’re overloaded with memory and information I think we should sometimes get rid of it and open up new space inside of us. I’m thinking of these practices – how to open the space, make room – for new information. That’s what really makes me feel good.
HI: If you had a magic wand, and could change one thing about the art scene in Armenia, what would it be?
I don’t see myself as a critic, but rather a solution finder. I wouldn’t change anything because everything that exists, exists as it is in the right time and in the right space dimension…but…during our gatherings for our new platform, “Antibodies”, we are discovering that the Armenian art scene is separated into groups. In Armenian dialect we call it “Taifaz”. Those groups feel stronger together, there is some common practice inside of it that I really love, because you feel more protected when you are inside of a community, but I think that we shouldn’t be so insecure, and we should become more open to communicate and more confident to engage each other. So yes I would like to find a map connection between groups and blur these borders between us.
HI: What is your dream project that you haven’t had a chance to work on yet?
I’m really thinking about how to invest in a new medium of communication. I’m really thinking about a digital project that would be a platform where we can exchange, propose [ideas], and get what we need. It could be for a social project, or an art project…A truly collaborative platform. Another thing I think about is how Art has the power to solve huge issues, including political issues. I’m thinking currently about the mount Amulsar, and I would like to develop some interactive performance that would integrate art in a non-artistic site. I’m really experimenting with this idea.
About Gohar Martirosyan:
Visit Gohar’s Virtual Viewing Room project, “Presence” until June 14, 2020.
Follow her on instagram @goharmartirosian
See her graphic design work on behance
Gohar Martirosyan lives and works in Armenia. She was born in Gyumri and grew up in Eastern Europe between Poland and Belarus. She studied at the Academies of Fine Arts of Krakow (Poland) and Yerevan (Armenia), and has presented her work in galleries, museums and exhibitions across Europe and the Middle East including the STANDART Armenian Art Triennale (2017), Gallery 25 (Gyumri), DEPO gallery (Istanbul), Weltkunstzimmer (Dusseldorf), Future2 Gallery (Vienna), and Gallery Dela (Tehran) among others.
Trained as a painter, Gohar has been making multimedia installations since 2015 including plastic works, light installations, and site specific and performative installation. Her artistic research addresses the fragile and opaque area where the public and intimate parts of our lives clash and merge. This work often takes her to open-air and natural spaces of cultural and historic significance, like Mount Aragats in Armenia, the Juist Island in the Northern sea, the Mush district in Gyumri, or the breach on the Rhine river in Dusseldorf.
Gohar works with symbols, archetypes, artifacts, spaces and artistic gesture as vehicles for exploring the human experience. She is particularly interested in the co-existence of modern and ancient life, where humans build themselves inside of history. Her practice is a continuous poetic questioning of social norms, and the limitations of individualistic societies’ “cult of separation”. Gohar’s overall goal is to create emotional mind-body experiences that explore who we are – personally and socially – as a means to help collective and collaborative cultures emerge.
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