Lucie Khahoutian

THE TAPESTRY IN MY ROOM

 

The work of Lucie Khahoutian, wavering between collage and photography, illustrates the constant dichotomy of her vision of the world.

The topics she approaches as well as her practice are fed by the binary influence of a childhood in a multicultural household. Orchestrating a discussion between Armenia and France, she feeds an exquisite cadaver narrating her story while resonating with her artistic influences.

She enjoys blending Armenian traditional visual codes with a more European or Occidental environment. Involving both her background and elements of her current life, she weaves a visual tapestry of her surroundings and aim to offer a complete and subtle visual universe in which occident and orient coexist smoothly. Just like a cadavre exquis would assemble bits and pieces from her personality in an anarchic yet truthful flow, collage was an absolute certainty to her. Mixing parts of worlds that are unknown to one another, she tried to make encounters between musical notes, as if she was writing a symphony about where she was from, and where she was going.

The works of Khahoutian approach a wide range of topics while being very focused on religion, spirituality, and mystical matters.

A difficult task, she aims to illustrate – little known – Armenian humor as accurately as possible, hence inviting a playful tone in her images. Far from an over intellectualized work she likes to work around the notion of absurd, inspired by Dada, or later on, Fluxus.

More than ever in a global context of identity confusion and political blur, Khahoutian believes it is essential to celebrate different origins and focus practice on the foundation of different identities, whether there are as human or artist, and on an individual or collective scale. She is proud to illustrate, through her work, the wealth of a cultural migration and bring a little bit of Armenia on an artistic scene that, as she says, seems to have given the cold shoulder to this part of the world for too long now.

Every layer of her collages becomes a period of her life, a person met, a language spoken, a place visited or a mood she was in. This collection of images, is a celebration of the most important part of artists’ identity, being a Caucasian women.

Lucie Khahoutian is an Armenian visual artist born in 1990 in Erevan.
She graduated from Minas Avetysyan school of Fine Arts in 2010 and received a Fine Arts Degree from the American University of Armenia in 2012.

Lucie’s body of work aspire to create enriching encounters between western contemporary visual culture and strong traditional Armenian references.
Her works approaches a wide range of topics while being very focused on religion, spirituality, and mystical matters.
Involving both her background and elements of her current life, she weaves a visual tapestry of her surroundings and aim at offering a complete and subtle visual universe in
which occident and orient coexist smoothly.
Going back and forth between collage and photography she plays with the idea of illustrating the magic or the ungraspable. In an constantly evolving practice she likes to renew the tools used to narrate her story.

She is a member of the collective Live Wild. She was recently a finalist of The New Vanguard Prize and Les Voies Off in Arles and the winner of the Emerging Talents Prize in Roma, Italy.
In 2017 she was a winner of Krakow Photo Month and Finalist during Hyères Photo festival and the Cosmos Award in Arles. Her work has been exhibited internationally through collective exhibitions and art fairs.
She is currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia

SATURDAY, MAY 11th › 4pm

Guided tour

EXHIBITION VENUE

Sotterranei del teatro Valli
Piazza Martiri del 7 luglio, n. 7
Reggio Emilia

OPENING HOURS

opening days
April 12th › 7pm - 11pm
April 13th › 10am - 11pm
April 14th › 10am - 5pm

April 20th to June 9th
Saturday and Sunday › 10am-7pm

Special openings
April 22nd, 25th, 26th › 10am-7pm
May 1st, 2nd, 3rd › 10am-7pm

Category
Teatro Valli underground