MELIK OHANIAN - SEVEN MINUTES BEFORE

The recording of the 21 minutes of Seven Minutes Before constitutes a technical feat in itself. In a tiny valley in the French Vercors, seven fields of vision were filmed simultaneously, gradually converging with each other. Through the sequences a concurrence of events is revealed; an enclosed cosmos of landscapes, voices and people. A mountain road, a tunnel, stone ruins, a man and a woman united in a silent ritual, trees and rocks, a wolf in a cage, a man walking beside the road, a bird of prey flying towards the camera, a motorcycle colliding with a truck, resulting in an overwhelming explosion which interrupts the movie, as if symbolizing the words ‘the end’. Overall the scene might be read as a fairytale, revolving around the reconstruction of a hidden number, a ‘cosmogram’ based on a collection of images and impressions. The rhythm – and the lyricism arising from it – is metaphorical for a search for a new principle of universal analogy. The installation, consisting of seven horizontal projections, does not create a onedimensional temporality, but it organises a spatial convergence of seven separate time streams and, during those sparse minutes after the accident, the divergence of seven other trajectories. The accident cancels out the representation of time; at the same time it is an indication that the conventional narrative form is exhausted to some extent, and there is a new relationship to space.

video | col.
sound
installation

Melik Ohanian In the work of Melik Ohanian (°1969) the world is not presented as a stage for human activity, and definitely not as a fixed, organised and hierarchical nature, but rather as an evolving cosmos, dynamic and full of life. Through various media, like video, photography and interactive or other types of installations, he reveals a cosmography of the image, a zone in which several realities coincide, from the present, the past and the future. In his slow observations of time and space breaking free of time and its system of reference becomes an essential part of the experience.

This event is part of Multipistes