DETROIT — In Portal Hearth: Shrines of the Torchbearer, Levon Kafafian invitations guests to embark on a transformative journey that transcends time and area, conjuring an imaginary world that challenges our perceptions of know-how, reminiscence, and id. A hive of textile-based artistry facilities speculative world-building because the artist traces a dynamic narrative that’s rooted, each visually and linguistically, in Armenian custom.
Kafafian, who works throughout a spread of mediums, intricately threads their exhibition on the Museum of Up to date Artwork Detroit with storytelling, taking guests via a collection of immersive vignettes that evoke the social cloth of a brand new world of the artist’s personal making: Azadistan, taking its title from the Armenian phrase for freedom, azad. Kafafian transports us hundreds of years right into a future representing the beliefs of resilience and pathways for cultural connection within the face of historic trauma and displacement.
The doorway corridor, or the “antechamber,” is the place we ritualistically cleanse and put together ourselves for our pilgrimage to the sacred shine on the coronary heart of Portal Hearth. Additional inside, we encounter the everlasting flame at a ceremonial altar known as the tonir — the Armenian phrase for a fireplace pit the place bread is usually baked alongside the edges, additionally symbolizing the solar. Kafafian transforms the second gallery right into a shrine, wherein San Francisco-based digital musician and sound artist Lara Sarkissian has scored a fusion of Armenian non secular and people music that treads the road between reminiscence and the unknown.
Levon Kafafian, “Torchbearer Relic” (2024), delicate sculpture, leather-based, beads, steel beads, and polyester fiberfill
Two cloaks hand-woven from cotton, rayon, and metallic threads, titled Torchbearer Clerics (2024), stand guard on the shrine. Close by, the set of silk-dyed panels comprising Torchbearer Cleric Auras (2024) particulars the rituals of the area with the historical past of the collapse of digital society in a futuristic language, which Kafafian created based mostly on the endangered language of Western Armenian. By English-language wall textual content, the artist interprets the story of Azadistan. This strategy prioritizes the viewer’s personal expertise within the area over Kafafian’s narrative, permitting us to soak up the world earlier than we study it. The richly textured chamber permits a multilayered encounter that channels the realities of displacement and enlargement in gentle of the historic and ongoing genocide of the Armenian individuals, together with the extermination of tangible heritage, traditions, and lands.
By exploring these questions via textiles and language, Kafafian additionally visualizes the material of record-keeping, mediums of cultural connection, and affirmations of id. In a world devoid of digital units, textiles change into prophecies and socio-political instruments that problem our building of historical past — encouraging us to additionally suppose critically about our personal beliefs and sketching an alternate imaginative and prescient of communication and expression past technological frameworks.
Finally, we arrive on the most sacred artifact of Azadistan: the “Enshrined Relic of the Torchbearer.” Based on the wall textual content, this mysterious relic has hovered in place for over 500 years, an artifact from a future that has but to be born. It reminds us of how time and reminiscence intertwine, and the way our previous might help us weave new futures — leaving an enduring impression that lingers lengthy after you depart from the world of Azadistan.
Set up view of Portal Hearth: Shrine of the Torchbearer with textual content within the artist’s fictional language based mostly on Western Armenian (photograph Tamar Boyadjian/Hyperallergic)
Levon Kafafian, “Torchbearer Cleric” (2024), set of two costumes, hand-woven cloak in cotton, rayon, and metallic with mixture of discovered materials, leather-based, beads, steel {hardware}/studs, and buckram
Element of Levon Kafafian, “Shrine Enclosure” (2024), silk, dye, acrylic, and cloth trim, adjoining to “Torchbearer Relic” (2024)
Element of guide bearing transliteration of inscriptions in Kafafian’s futuristic language
Portal Hearth: Shrine of the Torchbearer continues on the Museum of Up to date Artwork Detroit (4454 Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan) via February 23. The exhibition was organized by the museum with the Worldwide Studio & Curatorial Program.