VIDEO
#icantbreathe, influenced by Beckett's "Breath", 2021, 00:00:45
Developed for Anomalous Co.'s month long laboratory around Samuel Beckett's later plays as they pertain to the virtual.
Extra Credit, 2020, video, 20:20
Extra Credit is a video by Farrah Karapetian, made for the Wende Museum's Transformations exhibition, that reimagines Springtime, the 1976 painting by Boris Aleksandrovich Spornikov of female workers using flower petals to construct a mural depicting Lenin. Karapetian was fascinated by this painting because of the amount of faith those women must have had in the ideas Lenin represented, and because she couldn't imagine what or who now could command that kind of faith. Karapetian asked a network of her peers to ask their students in what or whom they believe; many were given extra credit for their participation. The artist sorted their responses and provided them to the Voices 21C chamber choir and artist collective, members of which elected certain phrases to improvise alone, under lockdown orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in the key of B flat major. Karapetian then constructed a sound sculpture out of their contributions, which plays over the image of her hands, picking petals off of flowers in every color of the rainbow. Before you can begin to depict what you believe, today, she thought, you have to ask the question, and you have to do this work: who knows which colors would be relevant to the building of a symbol that reflects the diversity of today's beliefs?
With great thanks to Voices 21C chamber choir and artist collective, and the network of educators that made this possible, especially including Emilie Amrein, Paul Lerner, Hunter Bivens, Susan Grieder, and Philip Gamaghelyan. Thanks also to Joes Segal and the Wende Museum for their always inspirational challenges and for keeping the questions of the past present today.
A score of the orchestration is now available as well.
VOICES 21C
André de Quadros, artistic director
Singing in this piece: Anais Azul, Chris Clark, Jesse Colford, Eugenia Siegel Conte, André de Quadros, Mary DiRoberts, Bradford Dumont, Lauren Extrom, Elise Felker, Michael Genese, Krystal Morin, Mariah Wilson
Ice Videos
Over time, Karapetian transitioned from using stable materials like glass and resin to using ice to create her transparent "sculptural negatives." When working especially with the objects that have made people safe over the last decade, and in considering the precarity under which people actually accessed those objects, ice proved an apt metaphor. Further work with ice and security is available in Relief and clear objects that precede the ice but contend with security are available in Accessory to Protest. The issue of security is also dealt with in Security Studies. Karapetian began working with ice as a material for an installation at the Orange County Museum of Art shown under The Built Environment, and explored the nature of the material with the series, Slips & Pushes.
The Gesture of Safe & Sanitary (ICE: pillow) - 30 second excerpt of 76:37
The Gesture of Safe & Sanitary (ICE: bar of soap) - trailer
The Gesture of Safe & Sanitary 2019
New Media theorist Vilem Flusser published his book, Gestures, in 1999, considering familiar actions, from smoking to photographing, in terms not only of movement, but also of the dynamic consequences they had between people and therefore societally. It's a phenomenological way of looking at the world, but also a banal one: taking small behaviors that engage minor tools and looking at what they do between people. Maybe Erving Goffman's book of 1950, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, also gets at this issue, but more practically. Karapetian has been interested in gesture - physical and metaphysical - since she devoted herself to creative practice, and of course before; she's also grounded herself in the objects that trigger gesture, usually remaking these in transparent material so as to photogram others. In recent work, she isolates seminal contemporary gestures along several themes, using her own body to register their consequence.
In The Gesture of Safe & Sanitary (ICE: Pillow), the artist lies on the concrete floor with her head on an ice cast of a toddler-sized pillow, enduring its melting under her as the sun goes down. With audio from the 9th Circuit Hearing of 17-56297 Jenny Flores v. William Barr, 18 June 2019, in which the U.S. Government argues that enumerating the objects imprisoned migrant children must have in order to be deemed safe and sanitary substantially alters the Flores Agreement of 1997, which would relieve the government of the court's order that its detention prisons be monitored. Those items include pillows, blankets, soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, something to sleep on other than concrete, and darkness for sleeping. 1:16:37. The other objects are also used in other videos.
Moving Negative: Relief
Moving Negative: Relief, 2016
This is a video of an ice cast of a life jacket - melting at 2400 feet. The melt takes 16:20 minutes.