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All That Is Seen and Unseen
2018
Multiple Works

Sugar as a memory.
Salt as an image.
Skin as a witness.
Hair as a timeline.
Light as a reflection of all that is seen and unseen.

In this project, Avakian examines printed books as sculptural objects of multiple layers of inscription. Books are symbols of history and are imbued with the weight of culture and authority. They are also a repository of sedimentations and traces, including oils and salts left by human touch. Avakian devises a series of protocols, procedures and rituals to extract and bring to light latent layers of incidental inscriptions and markings that are reminiscent of palimpsests. In a series of different artifacts, some layers are made visible, while other layers are separated from the book object to be transferred and transcoded into new sculptural fossils. Some of which appear like icons as light interacts with oils and salts. These artifacts include; Iconography (2018-2019), Residual Histories (2018), Biting the Skin Around My Nails (2018-ongoing), Memorandum (2018), The Book of Books (2018-2019), and Codex (2019).

Vartan Avakian’s work stems from a reading of data as stains and scratches: as a series of inscriptions that exist in sculptural form and are fossilized over time. Consequently, memory is seen as an activity of excavating and deciphering data from traces and remains. In this sense, photographs, drawings, sculptures, vinyl records, books, celluloid films, magnetic tapes, and hard-disks are not fundamentally dissimilar to dreams, aspirations, recollections, feelings, and other biological inscriptions on DNA polymers. They are similar in that they are scratches and stains that leave both perceptible and imperceptible traces, waiting to be uncovered, deciphered, and perceived.