NORTH FOR ME part I
The idea for the project «North for me» originated in 2004, at David Sarkisyan's suggestion, after he saw photos of my regular foray to the north. Particularly interesting to David were my photographs of Gustav Vigeland's statues which are located in Frogner Park, in the city of Oslo. This huge, multi-figure sculptural group, which has no analogues in the world, was created by Vigeland during the last twenty years of his life.
The subject of Vigeland's Statue Park is «the human condition» and the various stages of human life. Each group and individual sculpture expresses one aspect or particular stage of life and the ways of human beings in granite and bronze. These sculptures hold all and everything of the basic human experience and depict relationships between the sexes, between old and young and between family members such as the difficult relation to his or her offspring and parents along the inevitable path of human life – from the cradle to the grave.
NORTH FOR ME
part II
Vigeland's work reveals the deep loneliness he keenly experienced throughout his adult life. The theme of death is repeated in many of his works, and its expression changes from breakdown, anguish and melancholy to tenderness and even ecstasy, once again reminding us that life itself is cyclical and reproducible. A great number of nude figures in the park enhances the drama of the space and also its ambiguity; however, such exposure seems perfectly natural in the face of death and deep conflicts. Here, the nakedness of Vigelands figures is symbolic and intentional. The natural environment emphasizes and exacerbates this exposure and so opens us to the northern, passionate and piercing view of human nature – as element and as cycle.
A year later, the searches for the northern states led me to the Karelian Isthmus – to another powerful monolith. I wanted to stay there, to continue the elements' observation and my «northern meditation» and due to happy accidents, this dream came true. After a few months of the real wanderings, I was able to slip into this very tight, hermetic world and for a few years, the Island Tverdysh, northwest of Vyborg, became my home. Historically, this area has possessed strategic military importance, so it has changed hands many times but always remained a Finnish native land once called Ingermanland. Vyborg District has the largest outcroppings of granite on the face of the Earth and the Island of Tverdysh itself is a single rock about three kilometers long covered, in some places, with a thin layer of soil that extends to the surface waters of the fjords of the Baltic Bay. This natural organization provides a powerful grounding. It changes perception of the world. It lifts veils.
NORTH FOR ME part III
David decided to collect the materials of the «northern states» together and create a «Northern Cycle». As a person who incredibly and delicately felt the music, he decided to make an inner canvas of the exhibition with the themes of the great composers of Finland and Norway – Sibelius and Grieg and so the soundtrack, conceived by David, as a complex compilation of these two composers, was born. This musical basis accompanies the viscous and monotonous succession of landscapes, the depiction of white summer nights, black, snowless January sunsets where heavy northern winters, with the most powerful storms ultimately give way to the sharp lightness and bittersweet shortness of the northern summer. Granite is present as an eternal and unchanging witness of this northern cycle of seasons, forming nature's dance of death and renewal. The destiny of man is to enter into this natural life, to gaze on it and testify about it.
