Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art
http://www.accea.info/main.htm

1/3 Pavstos Biuzand Blvd., Yerevan, Armenia
Tel: +3741 56.82.25, 56.83.25, 56.02.18
Fax: +3741 56.02.16
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81 Murray Street, New York, NY, 10007, USA
Tel: +1212 732-3598
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Pavilion of Republic of Armenia
at 52nd Venice Biennale-2007

Sonia Balassanian-Who Is the Victim? War has changed. It has ceased to refer exclusively to war between nations, but involves more complex structures and dislocations. The information content the ubiquitous media images convey concerning specific conflicts is thin, they present an unchanging picture of misery as a universal constant of global crisis.

Memory assumes a central role in the lives of people who experience war and henceforth shift between two extremes, the collective necessity to remember and the individual desire to forget. For those who have experienced war or live in fear of one, or who live with memories of a war they actually took part in and survived, the question “who is the victim” is never far from the surface in depictions of war’s cruelty. But what is involved when a viewer of war images takes an interest in or empathizes with human suffering in far-off conflict zones? Not only those killed by war and their relatives are the victims, but all whom the fear of war afflicts. Compassion is an unstable emotion: “Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (Susan Sontag). In overcoming sympathy, a potential for action is released, a potential to lead-in to critical protest against an economy of global war.

Wars and crisis areas are a constant feature of Sonia Balassanian’s work. Her concern in her more recent video works are the ramifications of a general war (albeit never referred to as such) being waged against the individual. The images of Balassanian’s multipart video work “Who Is the Victim?” for the Pavilion of the Republic of Armenia at the 52nd Venice Biennale tap into this universalized misery and suffering of war.--Nina Möntmann

Sonia Balassanian (b. 1942) is one of the most influential artists in Armenia, working in the fields of video, performance, photo-collage and writing. She lives in New York and Yerevan.