All for car recovery

When Melik Ohanian and I met up in his Paris studio in late summer, he was concentrating on preparations for his exhibition From the Voice to the Hand , which was due to open in mid-September in 15 different venues in and around Paris. The origins of this project, which Ohanian refers to as ‘an ensemble of co-existing exhibitions that unfurl, within the same timeframe, on the scale of the city’1, were two nearly simultaneous invitations from the urban art centre Frac Ile-de-France/Le Plateau, which occupies the ground floor of a Paris high-rise, and from the Abbaye de Maubuisson, a 13th-century Cistercian abbey some 30 kilometres from Paris. Ohanian exhibits widely internationally, and less often locally, so the French artist decided to use the two initial invitations as an opportunity to create a network between numerous disparate sites and institutions as a means of re-articulating existing works, producing new ones and unveiling public commissions. Performances, film-screenings, a radio show, a website and presentations in galleries and at the FIAC art fair complete the programme. In the project’s press release and press conference, and during the course of our conversation, Ohanian described ‘From the Voice to the Hand’ as a way to ‘question the operative mode of the exhibition’ and to ‘consider the multiplicity of time alongside the singularity of spaces’.

While doing so, ‘From the Voice to the Hand’ provides an overview of Ohanian’s multimedia oeuvre and its concerns; one could even say it enacts them. His philosophical inquisitiveness is materialized in 10,000 Letters (2008), based on audio recordings of Jean-Luc Godard, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri and other theorists, whose words are reduced to cast-plaster letters dispersed in groups throughout the space of Le Plateau. He continues his ongoing investigation of the social function of communal spaces in a specially commissioned gigantic hammock (El Agua de Niebla, Water of Fog, 2008), spanning the grange at the Abbaye de Maubuisson, and a pitch for Cosmoball – a kind of football-in-the-round game he has invented, which will be played on site. Works from museum collections, such as ‘Selected Recordings’, a wilfully ambiguous, undated series of photographs, (1998), for which Ohanian asked three athletes to race against a spatial stopwatch – that of 16 mm film stock cropped to the length of the duration of their own personal records. Suspense builds as the runners speed around the indoor track while the metric length of the reel counts down in the upper-right-hand corner of the image, cutting off regardless of the athletes’ proximity to the finish line.

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