Gaze Painting

Nairi Afrikyan was born in Armenia. He lives and works in London. ARTIST'S STATEMENT My practice is based on the exploration of images or any other forms of documentations which bare witness to different experiences of a historical moment etched in time but share elements of absence and loss. This evokes feelings of melancholy but also, more important, constitutes a loss that drew me in through artistic strategies of repetition, substitution, and re-fabrication. I am involved in the probing of conjunctions in between emotions of loss, grief and trauma, and a visual language that places absence at its very centre. It is a practice based on the persistence of the traumatic past in the present; between what has happened and what could be comprehended; between an event and its reinterpretation. It is an analytic approach which refers to a permanent state of questioning, of transformations, and an endless probing of appearances. The focus in this practice is to question and reconsider the impulse and especially the objective of representing the lost object. I began to realise the compulsion of responding to the notion of a historical event by reflecting and visualising the traumatic happenings contemporary to the specific event, the Armenian Genocide, a compulsion to preserve loss by suspending and controlling time through space, suggestion, and allusion. The realisation is processed in the context of my personal emotions, referring back to actuality, preserved in photographic or any other form of documentation. My artistic strategy is to enable the sensation of the past to unfold, through the choices of medium (photograph, video and animation), while opening up the possibility for the object to embark on a relationship with the present.