Mikayel Ohanjanyan: Durk

La Statale Arte will officially open with Mikayel Ohanjanyan’s first solo exhibition featuring Dur (Door), a work specially created for the arcaded loggia of the Honorary Courtyard, on display alongside Tasnerku + 1 (Twelve + 1).

Tasnerku + 1 (Twelve + 1), set in the middle of the Honorary Courtyard, is an extended rendition of the work created for the Armenity exhibition curated by Adelina von Fürstenberg and hosted in the Armenian Pavilion, winner of the Golden Lion at the 56th Venice Biennial in 2015. Compared to Tasnerku (Twelve) presented in Venice, for his solo exhibition in Milan, Ohanjanyan has added a 13th element that is much larger in size and set outside the diagonal line formed by the twelve elements.
The thirteen basalt stones each rest on a Corten steel disk; the disks that are set out diagonally – almost like a sequence of pages – are engraved with the verses of Aravot Luso, a hymn composed by Nersēs Shnorhali, a 12th century theologian and poet and the Catholic Patriarch of Armenia, whose poem invites us to contemplate Christ through nature.
Ohanjanyan’s work, on the other hand, focuses on the writing of the hymn, whose thirty-six versus all begin with a letter from the Armenian alphabet: so they are more a tribute to the unifying language of tradition than the actual content of the poem itself.

Dur (Door) is a work specially created for the arcaded loggia in the 17th-century courtyard of Università degli Studi di Milano. It is composed of two cubic structures held in balance by a small cube placed in the middle of the space between them.

Like Tasnerku + 1, Dur can be traced back to music and, above all, to the rhythm of a musical adaptation of the numerical sequence worked out by Fibonacci in the 12th century. It is, in fact, a sculptural embodiment of a triton, the interval creating one of the main dissonances on the diatonic scale.