Haig Aivazian is an artist living in Beirut. Working across a range of media and modes of address, he delves into the ways in which power embeds, affects and moves people, objects, animals, landscape and architecture. Aivazian has explored apparatuses of control and sovereignty at work in sports, museums, the office and music. He is currently Artistic Director of the Beirut Art Center.
They May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light, Episode 1, 2022
Video in HD, black and white, sound.
Approx. 7′
Courtesy of the artist
Ultimately defined by its use of plasmatic motion, animation is metaphor incarnate, the hypostatization of deviancy onto the concreteness of the physical body, stretched and strained to the limits of recognition. Haig Aivazian’s They May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light, Episode 1 is, in the artist's words ‘a film about the alchemy of light and the rhythms of things made to flow."
Drawing from the magic lantern and the evolution of the language of animation, where fantasy and phantasmagoria are created through highly hierarchical modes of production and optical engineering, Aivazian edits, redraws and transforms diverse found cartoon footage to paint a picture of a city plunged in darkness, where "ghosts chase cops out of town, and labor and leisure shadow one another in elaborate labyrinthine infrastructures.’
In the guise of a linear narrative where two young adults go out to dance, while a younger child is left behind to devolve into increasingly tempestuous dreams, They May Own the Lanterns... is, to quote Tom Gunning, a "portrayal of the protean body" as a "fantasy of metamorphosis, change and mutability," that can carry the progressive promise of "a transformation... undergone by all – politically, socially".
—Haig Aivazian