Zarouhie Abdalian: To History

Nov 3 - Dec 16, 2017
Overview

Altman Siegel is pleased to announce To History, Zarouhie Abdalian’s second solo exhibition at Altman Siegel. Abdalian’s new body of work includes sculpture, works on fabric, and sound, all of which advance her investigation into the fundamental nature of human work, its preconditions and its artifacts. Throughout the exhibition, rock and stone stand emblematically for the subject of labor—the raw material to which work is applied. Registered in blows, gouges, and strikes, each artwork concerns the transient moment in which labor transforms its subject from the given to the made. Similarly, several of the works teeter at the edge of the transition along which the readymade maintains its delicate balance between the abstract and the concrete. Abdalian’s objects, however, are distinguished by their use-wear; focusing on the gouges, she highlights the very features that tell their singular and unrepeatable histories. With these objects the tension between the abstract and the concrete does not derive from the opposition of the readymade’s exchange value to its value in use but from the opposition of art’s image to that which it depicts; Abdalian casts this opposition as history written to history made.

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