Melik Ohanian

Borderland - I Walked a Far Piece

Melik Ohanian’s work Borderland – I Walked a Far Piece is conceived in a marginal, de-territorialised territory, on a floating New York rooftop, lit by a nocturnal bonfire, as a new huis clos. Bordeland is an open stage on which the artist presents characters from Rudolf Wurlitzer’s novel Flats, leaving them to get on with their lives in the present, mingling their travellers’ tales with those of other characters, migrants whom no one wants to take in anymore. Over the course of a single night, when the lights of the electric city seem to have gone out, Melik Ohanian weaves a resonant tapestry of fragmented rhythms, Beat poetry and the nomadic lives of these celestial vagrants.

Borderland - I Walked a Far Piece

Melik Ohanian’s work Borderland – I Walked a Far Piece is conceived in a marginal, de-territorialised territory, on a floating New York rooftop, lit by a nocturnal bonfire, as a new huis clos. Bordeland is an open stage on which the artist presents characters from Rudolf Wurlitzer’s novel Flats, leaving them to get on with their lives in the present, mingling their travellers’ tales with those of other characters, migrants whom no one wants to take in anymore. Over the course of a single night, when the lights of the electric city seem to have gone out, Melik Ohanian weaves a resonant tapestry of fragmented rhythms, Beat poetry and the nomadic lives of these celestial vagrants.

Days - I see what I saw and what I will see

DAYS, I See what I Saw and what I will See explores the notion of producing a continuous representation of space and a discontinuous representation of time. The film was shot over eleven days, from 24 February to 6 March 2011, in a Labor Camp in Sajaa, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Melik Ohanian built 100 meters of tracks to make traveling shots. Each day he installed the tracks and then filmed the 100 meters in approximately four minutes. The next day, he dismantled the tracks, re-assembled them and moved them 100 meters ahead – and film again. He did this for eleven consecutive days, shooting both during the day and at night. The incremental editing of the daily footage produced two singular films representing 1100 meters of space and forty-two minutes of time.