Norayr Kasper
STEEL-LIVES, STILL-LIFE
55th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Collateral Event
Installation by:
Norayr Kasper
Curator: Roger Connah
Deputy Curator: Chakè Matossian
“Norayr Kasper is a unique voice, blending a distinct artistic formation and
diverse cultural background into a rare and precious vision. Steel-Lives, Still-Life
is a summation of his aesthetic and intellectual obsessions.”
Atom Egoyan
Kasper is on his way back to the invisible city of his schooling and upbringing. After two decades as a cinematographer in Canada,
Venice is the city the artist has chosen to exhibit his first international work: STEEL-LIVES, STILL-LIFE.
After years of travelling throughout Armenia, the cinematographer, photographer and artist Norayr Kasper offers a narrative of the
Armenian steel industry from the last century. Steel-lives, still living; the paradox and acuteness in Kasper’s title is telling. “The
lucidity of the work is clear,” as the curator Roger Connah writes, “stay outside of history, but avoid being trapped by the limitations
imposed from outside.”
“Inspired by the remnants of post-Soviet industrial legacy in Armenia, Steel-Lives, Still-Life”, Norayr Kasper explains, “ is an installation
that attempts to give representational and narrative form to loss of relevance of both machine and man. Vast expanses of desolate
and abandoned buildings trace the tale of a once vibrant industry. Inside those still surviving factories, are the portraits of workers, in
age-old canvas uniforms, still tending to the odd machine in dim light and textured shadows of rust and grease”.
Layered with tonal and emotional significance, Kasper’s series of images haunt history and the space they have come to occupy; the
Neo-Palladian ‘Loggia del Temanza’ in the garden of the Palazzo Zenobio. The installation consists of four main silk-printed images
held in dialogue with the abandoned steel of the easels. These installations are delicately placed in parenthesis as the ghostly
unchanging imagery of the steelworks is projected, accompanied by a silent but insistent soundtrack which brings us face to face
with the dreamworld and utopia within these abandoned environments.
As the philosopher and critic Chakè Matossian writes, “Norayr Kasper unveils the spectral dimension of photography, and projects it
outside the frame of the work by floating large veils of silk in the space of the exhibition... The flowing fabric contrasts with the rigid
metal, the fluttering of the one with the immobility of the other, the poetics of the former with the aggression of the latter. By ironically
foregrounding the hardness of the easel, Kasper reminds us that it was originally an instrument of torture, a rack. There is no work
of art without torture.”
A corpse can indeed go on dying, as Jorge Semprun wrote, but whilst these industrial giants crumble in slow motion, residues
remain. Like the inert cast of animals, vegetables and flowers placed on a wooden table manifest their ultimate virtues in the Still Life
paintings of J.S.Chardin, similarly the textured layers of metal evoke both memory and history. This reminds us that the fragile stems
of political agendas always make up for knowing with a forgetting. That is why the woman located at the entrance to the ‘Loggia
del Temanza’ looks back to a future always held between the loss of relevance at one stage of life and the creative residue of hope
slipping into the present.
The photographer and artist Norayr Kasper takes us - literally by using silk - through these delicate images until we encounter the
Micro Museum of Lost relevance and Creative Residue. Less concerned with technical exactitude, Kasper confronts the visitor with
the architecture of this lost dreamworld. As if to question our own state of mind and the relevance to society today, here a silk book
of the images collected is locked within this fragile material. Kasper asks the same question Lenin did in 1901, the same question
turned into art protest, agency and resistance: What is to be done? Refusing however to compete with the slogan, Norayr Kasper’s
work is the very strength of fragility. Haunted by ghostly spatiality, deeply silent but nevertheless speaking in a loud and clear voice;
don’t accept imitations.
“Norayr Kasper is a unique voice, blending a distinct artistic formation and
diverse cultural background into a rare and precious vision. Steel-Lives, Still-Life
is a summation of his aesthetic and intellectual obsessions.”
Atom EgoyanNorayr Kasper - artist
A Canadian visual artist of Armenian ancestry, growing up in Venice and now living in Toronto, Kasper’s sensibilities stem from a
diverse cultural background, resulting in a rich multidisciplinary art formation. He studied photography and architecture in Venice
(IUAV Università), graduated in film production and cinema, Montreal (Concordia University, 1990). His work includes art and
documentary photography, art films, cinematography of over 30 television and feature films out of which he has shaped a distinct
visual signature. His first feature film “Calendar” (in collaboration with director Atom Egoyan), a dialectic between photography and
memory, won international recognitions among scholars and critics alike. Over the years he has received many cinematography
awards and nominations. Kasper’s expressionistic style emphasizes a rich visual experience where textural elements, lighting, and
movement heighten the expressiveness of his varied, cross-disciplinary works.
Roger Connah - writer, professor, curator
Associate Director (Graduate) Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University, member of the International Association
of Art Critics (AICA), author of Writing Architecture (1989), How Architecture Got it Hump (2001) Welcome to the Hotel Architecture
(1999), Aaltomania (2004), The Rest is Silence (2011) & The Anti-Library (2013).
Chakè Matossian - art critic, Philosopher, Essayist and professor
Professor at L’Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She
has published a number of works, articles, catalogue essays, collaborated with aesthetic and humanistic journals/magazines. She
has lectured at internationally renowned institutions (Villa Medicis, Collège de Belgique, Collège de France), universities and school of arts.
Catalogue by SKIRA
Press Office
Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena
Corte Zappa, Dorsoduro 1602
I-30123 Venice Italy
Tel./fax: +39 041 5224225
E-mail:
sl@steel-lives.com
www.steel-lives.com
Exhibition dates: June 2 - November 24, 2013 | 10 am to 6 pm
Admission free
Opening: June 1, 2013 (by invitation)
Venue: Loggia del Temanza
Centro Studi e Documentazione della Cultura Armena
Address: Corte Zappa, Dorsoduro 1602, 30123 Venice Italy
Phone/Fax: +39 041 5224225
Email:
oemme.ed@iol.it
