BRUSSELS.- In his new show, 'I copied this page in one country and the other page in another land' opening today at Baronian for the ocassion of Gallery Night by Art Brussels, Mekhitar Garabedian exhibits a series of drawings, calendars, and a poster, which together serve to manifest the fragility and weight of heritage. The exhibition will be on view until May 27th at Rue de la Concorde 33.

In his drawings, he shares his personal, alternative interpretation of the dense, prolific manuscript heritage of Armenia. By re-appropriating this medieval tradition, he also becomes a copyist, leveraging the graphic and artistic possibilities that this practice introduced. His series of sketches have seemingly reactivated the scribes’ muscle memory, underscoring the singular, contemporary relevance of these text fragments and imagery. Could Garabedian’s drawings be the revenants and traces of the long, lingering material, textual, and artistic history of these manuscripts?

The artist references the Armenian tradition of annotations and eyewitness accounts left by scribes at the end of manuscripts. These colophons provide valuable historic, and often surprising, information about the sociopolitical context and personal circumstances of the men who created these manuscripts. The titles of the show and of each of the works are all inspired by phrases taken from these colophons.

However, these colophons also contain important clues about the threat from hostile neighbours. Evoking the meticulous work of these Armenian copyists in light of the return of mass violence against Armenians can be quite confronting given that Armenia’s cultural heritage is under attack even today as a result of the very complex situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Garabedian highlights the fact that the combinations of ‘hidden’ motifs, shapes, colours, and letters were necessarily relegated to the margins and borders of these illuminations. In so doing, he repeats and redirects the scribe’s original gesture, bringing these graphic elements which are often ignored or neglected back to life in the process.

By reworking and reinterpreting the decorative borders of the illuminations and rearranging their ornamental elements, Garabedian creates new, different, mobile, and obviously more minimal configurations. Translation – moving away from the frame while cropping it – has always been at the heart of his artistic practice, which includes pictorial displacement as well as a displacement of the gaze and the interpretation.

Although the liminal is manifested here in a more graphic style, it is also deeply political. The echoes of a vulnerable Armenia, that has been invisible and forgotten all too often over the centuries, springs forth from the margins, breaking with tradition and breaking free from limitations.

With this show, Garabedian pursues his reflection on repetition, which started with his series on the Armenian alphabet. Here, however, the repetition transcends appropriative mechanics or technical prowess, becoming more akin to an exercise that is meditative, abstract and dynamic.

The citation, displacement, and translation around which the artist’s work revolves highlight yet again how artistic practice is always fashioned from what preceded it. It constantly seeks an archival, archaeological impulse.

By exploring these visual and textual sources, Garabedian gives an iconic tradition a new lease of life, as a constant reminder that the process of memory often takes place on the margins, the fringes, the borders, contours and sidelines of history. - Marie-Aude Baronian

Mekhitar Garabedian (°1977) was born in Aleppo and lives and works in Antwerp. In 2022 he created a sculpture in the city park of Antwerp, commissioned by the Middelheim Museum / Kunst in de Stad. He has been invited to participate in solo exhibitions at Bozar, Brussels, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Beursschouwburg, Brussels, BE-Part, Waregem and KIOSK, Ghent. In 2015, he presented several works at the Venice Biennale in the Armenian national pavilion, which received the Golden Lion. Other group exhibitions took place at the New Museum, New York, Hamburger Kunsthalle, WIELS, Brussels, 5th Thessaloniki Biennial, MARTA Herford, Villa Empain, Brussels, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Argos, Brussels, Haifa Biennial, BAM, Mons, M HKA, Antwerp, Drawing Room, London, Museum M, Leuven, Kunsthaus, Dresden, etc.