FIELD MEETING
October 26th, 2014 New York City

Haig Aivazian’s mesmerizing one hour-long keynote Performance-Lecture for FIELD MEETING, transported the audience through an array of images and sound, into the stories, dynamics, and narratives that emerged from the visualizations of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn Affair. Centered around an assault in a Sofitel suite in Manhattan, where the only witness was also the survivor of the attack, the work seeks to ultimately present a strange framework, through which an immaterial globalized financial economy and corporeal violence become inextricably linked.

> Watch Haig Aivazian’s Presentation

<< Back to all presenters’ profiles
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bio – Haig Aivazian (b. 1980, Beirut, Lebanon)
is an artist, curator and writer. Using performance, video, drawing, installation and sculpture, his work weaves together personal and geo-political, micro and macro narratives in its search for ideological loopholes and short circuits. Aivazian holds an MFA from Northwestern University and is a Skowhegan alumnus (2011). Refugee Olympics, part of the FUGERE project, was commissioned for Sharjah Biennial 9 (2009). Other parts of the project were exhibited in a solo show in Sfeir-­‐Semler gallery’s Hamburg space (2013). Collapsing Foundations, an installation and video performance work, was showcased in a solo exhibition at Parisian Laundry’s bunker space, Montréal (2012). Aivazian’s video works have been included in several exhibitions and festivals including at Mercer Union, Toronto (2011), FIDMarseille (2012) and Videobrasil’s Southern Panoramas (2013). Among his curated exhibitions are: Roads Were Open/Roads Were Closed at The Third Line, Dubai (2008); and Plot for a Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011), of which he was Associate Curator. Aivazian has written for a number of publications including Afterall Journal, Manifesta Journal, FUSE, Adbusters, Ibraaz, Bidoun, AMCA (Association for Modern and Contemporary Art of the Arab World, Iran, and Turkey), The Arab Studies Journal as well as several exhibition catalogues.

Haig Aivazian, To Neither Confirm Nor Deny that the Matter Neither Reflected Nor Absorbed Light, 2013. Lecture performance, approximately 60 minutes. Courtroom drawing by Elizabeth Williams, based on scenario provided by Haig Aivazian.