Anna Boghiguian 

Her installations are both memorable and unmistakable. Anna Boghiguian paints figures on cardboard, producing groups of imagery in spatially expansive tableaux that hang from the ceiling in the form of suspended mobiles, or are placed on the floor resembling miniaturized stage sets and condensed scenographies.

Boghiguian describes herself as a nomadic artist with an affinity for literature. Born in Egypt, her family emigrated to Canada, the artist has subsequently moved between continents and cultures throughout her life. During her travels, she fills her numerous notebooks with drawings in an obsessive accumulation of impressions, but above all one of stories, whereby narratorial strands involving the mythological and historical merge. Listening and hear-say play a major role. Boghiguian suffers from a hearing impairment, which according to the artist is precisely why the ear has become an important metaphor in her visual work. Sounds of the city, interpersonal communication, exchanges of information, and their conveyance become condensed in imagery that is linked like the processes of thought. The result is a diverse, incessant, and yet fragmented body of work that incorporates many differing aspects, but above all seizes upon the poetic, such as the work of author and Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz. She integrates collages, installations, and narratives within a mental and emotional cartography of the world while simultaneously addressing socio-historical injustices and guilt. In her exhibition A Short Long Story at S.M.A.K. in Ghent she examined the history of the textile trade, tracing the transport routes of cotton from colonial Africa to textile mills in Antwerp and Ghent in the form of painterly notations. The textile industry and the related issues of exploitation and social injustice are likewise a palpable issue in Bregenz and the Vorarlberg region, which the artist will be addressing on a grand scale in her characteristically dense narrative-based approach.

Biography

Anna Boghiguian (* 1946, Cairo) is an Egyptian-Canadian artist of Armenian descent. She studied political science and economics at the American University in Cairo until 1969, subsequently studying at Concordia University in Montreal, followed by several years of traveling. Since 2010 she has been developing three-dimensional presentations, which she installs in a manner evoking stage designs. Anna Boghiguian has also illustrated several books, including a volume of poetry by Constantine P. Cavafy. She has designed a series of twenty book covers for Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for iterature.

Anna Boghiguian is the recipient of several international awards, most recently the Golden Lion for her contribution to the Armenian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.