Concurrently with Anna Boghiguian’s exhibition Observations on Somethings Forgotten in Piraeus, and her sculptural intervention Sea & Earth in Regent’s Park as part of Frieze Sculpture, Living Amidst the Death in London is a eulogy to a place soon to become past.
In Piraeus, she travels in time using as vehicles two poems of the great Alexandrian Constantin V. Cavafy, recalling the notable cosmopolitan mediterranean city that once stood home for many cultures and civilizations. The paintings there, similarly to the ones in London, represent many absences.
Firstly, Alexandria depicts and talks about the cycle of history.
Boghiguian has dedicated her life to moving; a cartographer as well as a memory person, she lives within the cities she chooses to explore, and unlike the tourists she is a true traveller.
The cities often enter her work, and their stories, their histories.
In Cairo exists the Qarafa.
A necropolis that started developing in the 7th Century, an architectural and social wonder of the old world, still densely inhabited by its dead but also its living occupants. The current government has decided that in order to build the Passage of Paradise, the new name of the highway that will connect the city to the new administrative capital, the new Cairo, a big part of the City of the Dead will be cut off. Turmoil has been the result of this decision, unsuccessfully.
A big painting stands in the space accompanied by birds made in different materials: glass and papier mache, a technique Boghiguian has been using for years. The birds, the never ending travellers that hover above us, freely travelling from place to place, are a recurring element in Anna’s work. The painting, like most of her lightly touched though densely coloured surfaces, is a hallucination within the City of the Dead. A monumental body to the left turns almost into architecture, and to the right more figures, a naked woman surrounded by men and next to them a lady dressed in black, fully covered in traditional garments.
In the background, the buildings are breathing purples and pinks with splashes of yellows and ochres. We recognise the great mamluk dome of the Mausoleum and Khanqah of Khawand Tughay, alongside other domes and minarets of the same period that dominate the skyline of this dusty kingdom. Outside of the citadel are more colours. Boghiguian’s homage to the necropolis is not a first; she has painted it before. It is the colours here that make this portrait of a place breathe exuberantly with optimism, despite the catastrophe that beholds it, like it’s never done before.
Two tile-like paintings hang on the other walls, resembling windows to the interior of the graves that, unlike anything familiar in the western Christian-centric world, are places of gathering for members of the family of the deceased; a place for eating, performing rituals and spending time next to their parted ancestors.
Living in the City of the Dead, shows a seated figure to the right, contemplating its existence. A telephone in the middle of the canvas, and the writing ‘IF HE/SHE CALLS…SILENCE’ runs like a frieze or a modern LED sign above the capitals of the columns, signifying the absence of presence, even when the phone rings, a quiet lonely life for those who have either chosen or were forced to locate themselves there. The colours are vibrant and the presence of pomegranates and bottles suggest life, a contradiction only a place like this carries.
Interior of a Tomb, in identical scale, is much calmer in tonality. There is no language, nor too many things. An architectural painting of an interior, with talc pinks and light blues for the walls and the tomb, that we are looking into from the main arch of the room. An archway opens to the left, signifying more space and a group of shadows to the right.
Some more birds are flying above us, can we hear them?
Anna Boghiguian: Living amidst the death press release
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