Christopher Atamian

Biennale interview: Emily Artinian

May 16, 2009: Emily Artinian, who is exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, was interviewed by Christopher Atamian.  more...

Biennale interview: Archi Galentz

May 16, 2009: Archi Galentz, who is exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, was interviewed by Christopher Atamian.  more...

Biennale interview: Silvina Der Meguerditchian

May 09, 2009: Silvina der Meguerditchian, who is exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, was interviewed by Christopher Atamian.  more...

At the Venice Biennale: Underconstruction, 2009

May 09, 2009: For the first time ever, in 2009 the Venice Biennale will be presenting not only an official Armenian pavilion, but also five Armenian artists from the diaspora who belong to a collective called Underconstruction. Christopher Atamian, a member of the collective, introduces a series of interviews with the other members.  more...

Biennale interview: Achot Achot

May 09, 2009: Achot Achot, who is exhibiting at the Venice Biennale, was interviewed by Christopher Atamian.  more...

Biennale: Christopher Atamian’s artist’s statement

May 09, 2009: "Who am I?" Nigoghos Sarafian asks repeatedly in his seminal 1947 poetic novella "The Bois de Vincennes." At the 2009 Venice Biennale, Christopher Atamian projects excerpts from the original and his translation.  more...

Ara Baliozian reads the Armenians, yo’

Apr 18, 2009: In a sense, Ara Baliozian is heir to the Armenian writers before him who dared to analyze and constructively criticize Armenian society, Christopher Atamian writes in a review of Mr. Baliozian’s volume in French, “Pertinentes Impertinences.”  more...

Shedding light on what remains: Marc Nichanian's Novel of Catastrophe

Mar 27, 2009: In the final volume of his trilogy “The Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature of the 20th Century,” Marc Nichanian takes on Hagop Oshagan’s seminal but unfinished novel, Mnatsortats (the Remnants). Reviewer Christopher Atamian finds the book engaging, intelligent, and witty, though he is not persuaded by the argument that Oshagan’s failure to write the third part of Mnatsortats successfully demonstrated the impossibility of representing the Catastrophe in literature.  more...

Searching for home in the Armenian diaspora: an interview with Lalai Manjikian

Mar 05, 2009: Lalai Manjikian recently published her master's thesis from McGill University titled "Collective Memory and Home in the Diaspora: The Armenian Community in Montréal." Christopher Atamian interviews Ms. Manjikian to find out more about her project and findings.  more...

"The Amiras": Giving Armenians back some of their history

Feb 20, 2009: In a review of Pascal Carmont's 1999 book, "The Amiras: Lords of Ottoman Armenia," Christopher Atamian asks how it came to pass that the small town of Agn produced a whole line of Ottoman Armenian notables in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.  more...

“The boy who fell from the sky” or paternal parables for a new age

Jan 22, 2009: In a Lacanian sense, Aram Jibilian’s twin functions like a mirror image to refract or reflect back an incomplete image, both simultaneously deconstructing and completing the self, Chris Atamian writes.  more...

Lots of totems, no taboos

Jan 10, 2009: Allen Ginsburg howled it, Patti Smith screeched it, Jacob Riis photographed it. Denis Donikian both writes it and sculpts it. These magicians of the word, these voices in the wilderness, these brilliant, angry, poets are not content to sit back and let the most perverted ideologies and intolerance steamroll the world they live in.  more...

Studio Visit: Jan Baracz

Jan 10, 2009: Jan Baracz’s Reality Cinema/Live Video, at New York City’s Art in General gallery, challenges our notions of how we view the world around us while eliding the difference between video and film, Chris Atamian writes.  more...

Studio visit: Silvina Der-Meguerditchian

Dec 12, 2008: Naming suffering, exalting it, dissecting it into its smallest components - that is doubtless a way to curb mourning.-Julia Kristeva  more...

Reading the word, reading the image

Dec 01, 2008: I have admired Madeline Djerejian's work since her graduate thesis show at SVA in 1997. Those 11 color portraits possessed that rarest of qualities: a quiet, almost hieratic presence, as if the work were whispering unknown aesthetic secrets to your subconscious. The portraits were alive yet distant, cool yet engaging, and displayed near-perfect composition.  more...

Studio visit: Zadik Zadikian

Nov 07, 2008: The female form never looked better than this past week at Tom Otterness' Brooklyn studio, where Zadik Zadikian exhibited his 2008 "Erotic Gold Sculptures." These ten exquisite works - made of fiberglass with gesso and French clay and gilt in 24-carat double gold leaf - were laid out in rows at waist height. They appeared to leap out at visitors, so taut were their contours and so vivid their energy. Measuring about one foot in each direction, they are built on a perfectly human scale, bold but never intimidating. For Zadikian, who spent much of his youth at the forefront of the downtown New York art scene, the show was a homecoming of sorts.  more...

Studio visit: Linda Ganjian

Oct 11, 2008: Cities of the mind "I shall tell you what I dreamed last night," he says to Marco Polo. "In the midst of a flat and yellow land, I saw from a distance the spires of a city rise, slender pinnacles, made in such a way that the moon in her journey can rest now on one spire, now on another, or sway from the cables of the cranes."-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities  more...