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| Pahlavuni - Tadevosian Vazgen Born in 1955 in Gyumri, Armenia. Lives and works in France and Armenia. In recent political history, the unrestrained hail of images and information and at the same time the almost automatic self-censored dispute in every single attempt to express a totally different viewpoint, tend to regularize the pretence of a democratic dialogue, where every party is obliged to make its position clear through sound reasoning. The spectacle is a dialogue without imagination as the two parties express the same viewpoint by using slightly different words; there is no real conclusion and the outcome is pre-determined. Vazo attempts to clean up the scenery from the unnecessary information and to rub out the sound of words. He keeps the memories of a -first rock generation- song, the Black Dog by Led Zeppelin, of the sound of a hurling shoe and of a dog’s barking. With these materials, by means of deduction, the only thing he chooses to set aside from the current political scene is the politicians’ relationship to dogs and shoes. Emotions interchange with associations of ideas and Putin’s beloved black Labrador or Obama’s newly acquired Portuguese waterdog seem to act, in a surrealistic way, as governors. On the other hand, activism and the gesture of protest are isolated and connected with the image of the flinging shoes aiming at President Bush in Baghdad, at the Chinese Prime Minister in Cambridge, at the Ambassador of Israel in Sweden. Furthermore the artist remembers that the lights of publicity focused on the shoes of the French President Sarcozy, as the news reports diffuse that he has them tailored by a particular shoe-maker and they let a certain rumour going around along with an ironical gossip smile, that the shoe-maker gives more height to the heels. Vazo recounts the idea and the dream that led him to these sketches: The idea was based on Nietzsche’s words from Thus spoke Zarathustra: “Man is a cord tied between the animal and the superhuman -a cord above abyss”. His dream was to organise a spectacle with dolphins. Conceivably in the Aegean Sea. Maria Tsantsanoglou  Download CV |  Contemporary Bestiary, 2008 |
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