Description: In collaboration with Anna Sowa (Armenia)
Audio-visual Manifesto, in which sound and animation form a complex interacting structure. In these times of globalization and armed conflicts, which concept of ‘country’ is closest to you? How do you identify with the place where you were born? Do you feel an attachment to the environment in which you grew up? What influence did it have on you? A country is not a territory but, above all, people who, despite all their differences, think alike, share a common history, function and empathize in similar ways. It is, in a direct and symbolic sense, a family bound by blood. It is people who breathe at a similar rhythm and in the same polluted air. People who face an overwhelming reality day after day, living on the run, not knowing where they are going. With a similar physiognomy and physiology, a common DNA that cannot be changed. A piece was a part of the ARTIVISM Project.
Anna Sowa
Anna Sowa is experimental composer and artist, mainly focused on exploring electronic music and fields of performing arts.
Born in 1987 in Limanowa (PL), currently resident in Basel. She graduated from the Bacewicz Academy of Music in Lodz (PL) where she had studied with Zygmunt Krauze. As part of the Erasmus+ Programme she studied composition and visualization with Dietrich Hahne at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen (DE) in years 2014-2015. As a Chinese government scholarship recipient she was student at Shanghai Conservatory of Music (CN) in years 2017-2018. In 2021 she graduated with distinction ‘Specialised Master’s in Composition with Caspar Johannes Walter and Johannes Kreidler.
In 2021 she won, together with the association Anomalia, the 3rd edition of the Fringe competition of the Foundatione Haydn Stiftung. As part of the prize, Anna Sowa’s opera Silenzio/Silence was premiered in March 2022 as part of the Festival Oper 2022 in Bolzano.
Gohar Sargsyan Artist. Born in Gyumri, Armenia in 1981. Studied History of Arts at the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia and Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany. In 2016, Sargsyan graduated from the Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinematography with a degree in Animation.
She works with different mediums, combining painting, textile design, installation, video art, and animation in her projects. Her main artistic interests of artwork focus on social interaction, processes of self-identification, and exploration of the concept of "humanity".
She led workshops at the Goethe Institute, International Women's Association of Yerevan (IWAY), Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife & Cultural Assets, and summer schools in Berlin, Rudolstadt, Ranis, etc.
She is a participant in Armenian and international exhibitions, including Biennale Aktuelle Musik (Germany), Prague Biennale (Czech Republic), The International Print Biennale (Armenia), Odesa Photo Days Festival (Ukraine), John B. Aird Gallery (Canada), ARé performing arts festival, Yerevan Biennial Art Foundation.
Her solo exhibition "Strangers in the Room" was on display at the National Library of Armenia, and took place in the context of the campaign “Arts and Culture Against the Crisis”, organized by the Embassy of Switzerland in Armenia. Project “The Return of Western Armenian Poets” was selected for the Grant of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and will be implemented in 2024.
- The first prize winner in One Shot International Film Festival with her short experimental animated film called Right or Left.
- The third prize winner in the Michelangelo’s Brush International art Competition, Italy, 2021.
"I work on reconciling the dichotomy between the visuals that come to the world outside our bodies and the ones existing within our psyches, by re-contextualizing them into intimate, familiar narratives, within the subtext of collective consciousness. This is emphasized both in my landscape works as well as portraitures.
Having learned various media and artistic means from graphics to painting to video art, I seek to reconstruct spaces and figures into poetic signifiers using color, form, and lines. Over the years I have been creating my personal approach with paint, layering colors and textures, creating washes, forcing erasures, and overlaying and experimenting and combining with different mediums."
