Are There Visible Things Impossible to Show?
by Eva Khachatryan

According to Theodore Adorno, new forms of art have not been called upon to provide equilibrium, but to disrupt it, to blow up the archaic and monotonous course of existence, and make one to freeze in horror by watching own life.

David Kareyan’s art criticized those social mechanisms, which depress man’s individuality. By searching for ways out of this crisis the artist tries to emphasize the fake mechanisms of self-assertion, as well as the essence of individuality.
In David Kareyan’s works reality appears in the form of symbiotic antagonisms of re-living the inner world. These are images of inconveniences of reality. “Mechanism of bloodless change of the state does not satisfy worshipers of blood”, states the artist.

Is a structure, which will put an end to social intolerance, possible? Video-installation of “The World Without You” (1999) poses this question. Television sets placed in an environment built of artificial plants, show a man wallowing in mud. He tries to return to nature, but does not succeed, because these days nature has turned artificial. The hero, a victim of civilization, is uselessly striving for wholeness. He is unable to recognize and understand his own self.

Objects placed in David Kareyan’s video-installation “Give Me Back My Innocence” (2000), stones, dung, pile of hay and scare-craw, depict rural environment, away from civilization. As if here, man cane eventually be relived from logic. He lets out strange sounds, wallows in wool, and imitates animals, which is no more than centuries old desire of man.

In his video-installation entitled “Digestible Reality” (2002), David Kareyan by continuing to study man’s essence, creates a different image with two conflicting worlds. In one world there are pale, mud covered domestic items and planted natural trees, which are seemingly representing remnants of life, history and civilization. In the other world a family (a man, a woman and a chilled) is shown on a television monitor. They are naked, sitting on the floor, are playing. The artist instead of showing nakedness in the forest, shows it in contemporary interiors. Here there is note discrimination. There is only solidarity and mutual understanding, As if the harmony, which is sought by post-industrial man has been found.

These are images of life, which we cane see, but it is only the artist, who can show them.

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WRITING

Are There Visible Things Impossible to Show? by Eva Khachatryan

ART, BODY, AND SOCIETY By Vardan Azatyan

Body as a Site of Social Critique:
Death and Sacrifice in David Kareyan’s Videos by Angela Harutyunyan

New Locality by David Kareyan