No sensation of falling, no abrupt awakenings, yet these dreams marked my memory, either due to their vividly spatial qualities or their affective charge, or the manner in which they resonated and coincided with real life occurrences.
Unable to shake the relics of these visions, I began to consult dream interpreters, making a series of explicative drawings while recounting the reverie at each visit. Depending on the interpreter's line of inquiry and attention to given details, the compositional focus, speed and areas of interest of the drawings morphed accordingly.
I recorded and transcribed these sessions and then edited and spliced together the words of the different interpreters and omitted any direct allusion to the specific contents of the dreams. The texts became accounts, though it was hard to say what they were accounts of.
With the help of an actor whose face I could not make out but whose voice will always linger, I re-recorded these new transcripts. In a bid to better see with my hands what my drawings were unable to bring to light, the recordings prompted me to sculpt and assort strange clay objects, which to me looked like Mesopotamian clay tablets transcribed in cuneiform and other markings. The ceramic objects were also like findings that had been excavated from the elaborations of the interpreters, referencing various artifacts, shapes and vessels.
The dreams became carefully arranged displays in dimly lit rooms where the walls contained clusters of drawings, where the vitrines looked like beds or desks or plinths, and where a gentle voice lulled me to sleep by describing the very dream that I was about to see upon falling asleep.
Timeline for development of Project: the pre-production will start in August 2013
About the artist
Haig Aivazian is an artist, writer and curator, currently based in Beirut. He works with text, sculpture, video, performance and drawing in order to weave in and out of personal and geo-political, micro and macro narratives in the search for ideological loopholes and short circuits. Aivazian was associate curator of the tenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial in 2011 and his writings have appeared in a number of publications, including Bidoun, AdBusters, FUSE, AMCA and The Arab Studies Journal.