Interest in the body and its exploration likely began alongside the emergence of humanity itself. Through the body, humans have sensed, recognized, and shaped their understanding of existence, life and death, relationships with other bodies, the structure of the world, as well as of imaginary worlds, alternative forms of being, transformations, and transitions. In his lecture “Utopian Body,” Michel Foucault described the body as the zero point of the world. \u201cThere, where paths and spaces come to meet, the body is nowhere. It is the heart of the world, this small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I imagine, I perceive things in their space, and I negate them also by the indefinite power of utopias I imagine.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Almost all of Mher Azatyan\u2019s projects, either directly or indirectly, address the issue of the utopian body. In his poetic combinations of text and image, the artist consistently explores, interprets, and articulates the utopias of the bodyless body. In his works, the absence of the body achieves ephemeral realization through inconspicuous images and incidental simple thoughts. The artist appropriates and transforms space with his new visual and textual utopias. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In his new project, Mher Azatyan reveals the fragmentary essence of the body’s utopia. Certain parts of one’s own body remain invisible to the person, often the body could be also dismembered, but this does not mean that the body loses its utopian wholeness in human consciousness. A person can be cut off from their familiar landscape, just as the body of the landscape can be fragmented, severed, and carved up by humans, limiting the physical presence of human\/humans’ political and social body\/bodies there. However, this does not exclude either the wholeness of the landscape’s body, or, despite profound psychological pain, the representation and connection to that body that exists in the consciousness of the person\/people cut off from there. Just as Foucault does not oppose utopia to the body, but instead views the body as the source of utopias, so too the artist takes the body beyond its boundaries, identifying it with other bodies, spaces, and characters while nonetheless suggesting the presence of the body outside of utopia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He considers the human body as the central actor of all utopias, through which a person is able to overcome the anxiety of confronting the finitude and vulnerability of the exposed body, as well as to feel, comprehend, and give life to reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The exhibition curator by Ruben Arevshatyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interest in the body and its exploration likely began alongside the emergence of humanity itself. Through the body, humans have sensed, recognized, and shaped their understanding of existence, life and death, relationships with other bodies, the structure of the world, as well as of imaginary worlds, alternative forms of being, transformations, and transitions. In his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":7321,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_eb_attr":""},"projects_categoria":[173],"class_list":["post-7386","projects","type-projects","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","projects_categoria-exhibitions"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects\/7386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/projects"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects\/7386\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10890,"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects\/7386\/revisions\/10890"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"projects_categoria","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects_categoria?post=7386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}