'Questions that you never want to answer'

Figuring out Armenian-Lebanese designer Karen Chekerdjian's work is hard to do - and that's the point

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Friday, January 25, 2008
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: It's the early days of the US-led war in Iraq and Karen Chekerdjian, a Beirut-born designer, has just relocated to Amman. She is an ardent fan of origami. When she married, not long ago, she sent out her wedding invitations folded in origami fashion. But now she is alone in the Jordanian capital and listening to the sounds of aircraft overhead with incrementally mounting anxiety. To pass the time, she folds a paper plane, then another and then another still. But her aircraft - fragile, delicate, light and artfully rendered - seem incapable of even mentally counterbalancing the ominous referents that are buzzing above her. She decides to make one out of metal.
Chekerdjian, who has forged a career out of critically confusing the boundaries between art and object, pays a visit to a nearby metal workshop. It takes her three months to convince the craftsman there that an aluminum sheet can indeed be folded as nimbly and precisely as her paper planes. He refuses, tells her it's impossible and then finally acquiesces. They cut the aluminum sheet with a knife on one side, fold it by hand and then weld the front seam for support. Chekerdjian takes the name of a torn-apart country, rearranges the letters, adds a phonetic similarity to the French name for the Greek mythological figure Icarus and names her piece, produced in an edition of 12, "Iqar."
A year later, on a cloudy day, Chekerdjian is back in Beirut and drops by XXe Siecle, the Hamra design gallery that serves as the agent for her work. She is looking for her metal plane, which doubles deceptively as a coffee table. She can't find it. She spends 15 minutes pacing the gallery's ground floor, wondering if Soheil Hanna, XXe Siecle's irrepressibly charming director, was disappointed in the piece. Finally she spots it, right in front of her. Amid the vintage Italian light fixtures and chairs by the likes of Oscar Niemeyer and Jean Royere, "Iqar" simply loses itself. Its shiny surface reflects everything around it but doesn't announce the presence of another competing design object. Chekerdjian smiles. She likes the disappearing act very much.
The three stages of this story - inspiration, production and display - underpin Chekerdjian's participation in "Echo," the latest, expansive group show to open at Galerie Sfeir-Semler in Karantina. An exploration of the overlap between art and design, "Echo" features the work of eight artists ranging from Italian Arte Povera pioneer Michelangelo Pistoletto, 74, and veteran minimalist Keith Sonnier, 66, to Iranian-German newcomer Timo Nasseri, 35.
The show is remarkably rich, packing the 1,000-square-meter space with more than 35 pieces that, true to the title, visually echo and in many cases literally reflect one another. From the right angle, Pistoletto's mirror picture "Mediterranean Flag (Red)" catches and refracts the image of Nasseri's 2007 sculpture in wood and aluminum sheet. Entitled "Fajr," Nasseri's piece consists of three letters in Arabic script and a loaded double-entendre. "Fajr" means "dawn," and it is also the name of a well-known, Iranian-made missile. The same applies to Nasseri's companion piece "Raad," which means "thunder." Another piece, not on view for this show but a part of the same series, is named "Shahab," which means "falling star." Nasseri has seized on the fact that all these missiles are named for natural phenomena.
Galerie Sfeir-Semler, which opened in Beirut three years ago and has a sister branch in Hamburg with more than two decades of experience behind it, is known for its work with minimalist and conceptual art. "Echo" plays up the former and is the most tactile show so far to open at the gallery in Lebanon. It is also the first for which gallery director Nathalie Khoury, who has a background in graphic design and previously produced a terrific collection of purses and evening clutches, has been heavily involved in shaping.
"I wanted people from this part of the world who are not necessarily conceptual," Khoury says, "who are not the artists we know," a reference to artists such as Walid Raad and Rabih Mroue, who are represented by the gallery and known for making intensely intellectual work. "I wanted people who are working in a different way. We have a lot of talented people who are not artists but whose work is as interesting and powerful as the contemporary art we know."
The result is, essentially, a show of sculptures that explore form and function rather than sociopolitical critique, though such distinctions are deliberately unstable. Chekerdjian is exhibiting "Iqar" along with examples of her "Rolling Stones" and pieces from her "Disappearance of Objects" series, which was inspired by the experience of losing her table among other works at XXe Siecle.
Her work is also a lesson for local designers and artists alike who struggle to carve out a place for themselves between disciplines and who fight to translate their ideas into pieces that can actually be produced.
"With all of my work," she says, "you don't know if it's an object or a sculpture ... if it is useful or not. And these are the questions," she smiles, "that you never want to answer. My work is always on the edge between object and art. My aim is always to have functionality. But utility isn't the only issue."
What's more, she explains, because Lebanon isn't an industrial powerhouse, it makes more sense for designers with artistic aspirations to create prototypes. And prototypes are expensive. They are, perhaps by default, closer to rarified art than accessible design.
"Now in my office, I have a list of craftsmen I can work with," Chekerdjian says. "We are limited in what we can produce here. You have to get into the space of production, of finding solutions. And you have to have an approach of experimentation, where everything is possible."
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