BERLIN — It’s grow to be clichéd to say that music unites us, however Silvina Der-Meguerditchian turns this truism right into a nuanced and polyphonic exhibition with Those that maintain us. At Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, the Armenian-Argentinian artist affirms music’s binding energy whereas additionally revealing the methods by which music-making, as any inventive exercise, is tainted with cultural prejudice.
Curated by Barbara Höffer and Lusin Reinsch, the present contains movies, archival paperwork, images, and multimedia installations. A qanun, a standard stringed instrument from Armenia and different elements of Southwest Asia and North Africa, can also be displayed in a glass vitrine. It’s a becoming delight of place; the primary cluster of works, titled and grouped below the theme of Resonance, bears out the instrument’s significance. For the brief movie “Qanun Archives: Cairo Munich” (2024) — initially advised from the angle of a Black Nile catfish whose pores and skin is used to make strings — she interviews the musician Hanan El Shamouty, who immigrated from Cairo to Germany solely to find the latter’s bias towards Western music concept, disregarding her traditions.
In her movies, Der-Meguerditchian juxtaposes such inflexible hierarchies of musical style with transportive tales by which fish, bushes, and disembodied ghosts are reincarnated as qanuns. In “Qanun Archives: Buenos Aires” (2025), set within the Nineteen Fifties, a younger man from the town’s Armenian neighborhood is guided by a spirit to an exiled qanun grasp, and persuades an Argentine pal to construct the instrument. One other brief, “Armenia” (2025), captures the agility of ladies enjoying qanun, whereas the voiceover recaps the profession of the primary Armenian feminine Qanun participant, Angela Atabekian, in a practice traditionally dominated by males. Ultimately, in all these tales, music transgresses geographic, social, and cultural boundaries, performing as a key agent in constructing and preserving collective reminiscence.
Set up view of Those that maintain us
Because the exhibition progresses, the qanun additionally emerges as a stand-in for diasporic migration — not simply by way of sound or vibration, however slightly a state of consciousness, a connective tissue binding Reminiscence (the present’s second theme) and preservation, or Care (its third). Within the center galleries, Der-Meguerditchian then weaves private and archival images and paperwork, reminiscent of passports, into laminated carpets hung from the ceiling. These commemorative mosaics create a mnemonic cascade — areas, reminiscent of Aleppo, Istanbul, and Berlin, commingle; household portraits and postcards are proven alongside snapshots of ceramics, jewellery, and different small objects. These transportable mementos converse to cumulative loss, culminating within the exhibition’s last part by which it’s not objects or archives as transportable carriers of reminiscence however the physique itself.
The artist strikingly evokes ladies’s our bodies in a sequence of braids constructed from wool, every titled with feminine names and displayed as sculptural objects on the partitions. Within the brief movie “Care to Care” (2024), younger ladies, seated outdoor in a rural setting, brush one another’s hair in fluid strokes. There’s maybe no higher method to describe these gestures’ rhythmic, languid pacing than “musical” — and it’s right here that Der-Meguerditchian lastly brings out the central side of her oeuvre. She treats not solely music but additionally the human physique, in all its expressivity, as a language, affirmed and renewed by way of day by day gestures of preservation and care.
Set up view of Silvina Der-Meguerditchian’s “Care to Care” (2024) in Those that maintain us
Those that maintain us continues at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Mariannenplatz 2, Berlin, Germany) by way of April 6. The exhibition was curated by Barbara Höffer and Lusin Reinsch.
