Tigran Khachatryan - Just Politics     Aug 25 - Sep 19, 2009

Tigran Khachatryan’s project is the result of discussions of global crisis and socialist economy, about radical left and colored revolutions waged at conferences, art forums, on the Internet, in TV broadcasts, in the streets and squares of Russia recently. For Tigran politics is meaningful only if it serves the idea of justice. Discussions of “fair politics” have been of crucial importance for the intellectuals of the Russian empire, the Soviet Union, and all the post-Soviet space. From 1861 the Russian empire was the country where projects were planned and implemented, the projects which are viewed as natural rights and indispensable cultural values by the majority of people today, such as women’s right for secondary and higher education, tolerant attitude to sexual minorities, support of freedom movements and cultural autonomy of peoples around the world, conscious technological progress which is to liberate people from alienated labor, the awareness that the planet is our common global home for which we are responsible. Tigran Khachatryan sees the Soviet Union as the successor of the Russian revolutionary ideas of the 19th century whose progress stopped in 1928. The Fair Politics project is a unique experiment of a contemporary person who wants to remember his own revolutionary past, his idealistic, in the positive sense of the word, view of the world around him. The period from 1861 to 1928 is what inspires Tigran Khachatryan with its openness – the openness of the mind and of the body.

The Fair Politics project presents a remake of the film by Dziga Vertov titled The Man with the Camera and, as its antipode, posters for the counterrevolutionary manifest of Aron Zalkind, his Twelve Sexual Commandments of the Revolutionary Proletariat. The project also comprises four video films (which are also remakes of the famous films by Sergey Parajanov, Andrey Tarkovsky, Jean-Luc Godard, Artavazd Peleshyan) produced by Tigran Khachatryan from 2001 to 2007. Aubergine Color (200), The Stalker (2004), China Woman’s Brother (2005), The Beginning (2007), all the films were planned as a conflict between revolutionary and counterrevolutionary tendencies in the universal modernist aesthetics.

Tigran Khachatryan was born in 1980. Lives and works in Yerevan, Armenia. In 2004 he graduated from the Yerevan Academy of Fine Arts.

Tigran Khachatryan’s works were displayed at the following exhibitions: The Generational: Younger than Jesus, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, the Second Moscow Biennale of Young Art, Monuments of our Discontent: Expiration of Place, Winzavod, Moscow.

For further information: (495) 228-13-30, e-mail: gallery@regina.ru