Portrait of Duration

Melik Ohanian’s entire body of work interrogates both the whereby of the image and its allegorical power, constantly returning to a certain number of themes: desert zones, the working class world, the end of revolutionary utopias, and matters of science, history, and society. Indeed, several are the pivotal themes in his work and history, space and time can be identified as his strongest concerns and considerations.

For the exhibition Portrait of Duration, Melik Ohanian has focused on the material of time, which is inseparable from space, conceptualizing the space as a context and the pieces in it as its dimensions. Inviting the public to experience time through its standard of measurement, the artist proposes a cosmic scenario halfway between poetry and science, where the infinitely small and the infinitely great interact at different dimensions and these two extremes make the objects of our world disappear for the time of the exhibition. Portrait of Duration comprises 9 photographs which are part of a larger body of work “Portrait of Duration – Cesium Series”, 2015, black and white photographs: the piece shown at FIAC 2015, when the artist was shortlisted (and later awarded) for the Duchamp prize.