INVISIBLE FILM

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  • Artist Melik Ohanian
  • Technical: Video insallation Courtesy Melik Ohanian et L’IAC Rhône-Alpes
  • Duration: 90'
  • Year of production: 2005
  • Country: France
Invisible film by Melik Ohanian is the acoustic and subtitled film of a projection: the 35 mm projection of an original copy of the film Punishment Park by Peter Watkins at the location where the film was shot in 1971. Melik Ohanian carried out the projection in real-time at nightfall and without a screen, in the desert of El Mirage in California. Reigniting the question of documentary genre and fiction, Punishment Park is a political film that has been censored for 25 years in the United States. By the re-appropriation that Melik Ohanian carries out, the film becomes invisible again since its screen is the landscape (evocative of one of the two great genres of American cinema: the western and the road-movie) and shows the cinematographic device itself. It is the sound (the dialogues of the protagonists) that makes it apprehensible, understandable, in its initial and engaged purpose.

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Melik Ohanian

Born in 1969 in Lyon (France). Lives and works in Paris (France) and New York (USA). Melik Ohanian is a graduate of the National School of Fine Arts in Lyon and Montpellier. He represents France at the 26th São Paulo Biennale in 2004, at the Moscow and Lyon Biennials in 2005, at the Gwangju and Seville Biennials in 2006, and most recently at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. His work has been displayed in international exhibitions including the Chantal Crousel Gallery, the Tokyo Palace in Paris, the South London Gallery in London, in De Appel in Amsterdam, in the Institute of Contemporary Art in Villeurbanne, at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York, at the Museum in Progress in Vienna and at Matucana 100 in Santiago in Chile. Melik Ohanian's work revolves around the image and its allegorical potential. In most of his works, he analyses the potential for image representation and questions related to identity, which gives his approach a socio-political dimension. Many of his works show his interest in distant spaces and uninhabited territories.