Diana Hakobyan is one of those artists for whom the choice of the media has never been an obstacle: she approaches the canvas with the same easiness as she does the object or a video. However, if the paintings and objects have certain representative elements, the video brings a new language, which is often much more personal and has social content.
In 1997 artist did her first experiment with new media. In her first video (Untitled) the artist seems to refuse the advantages of the moving image, combining the static portraits of her friends with a rotating mechanical device. The author uses the new media in a peculiar way: Diana makes minimal use of the features of the camera and editing. She only transfers the image to a new domain and adds a voice to it in order to get the rhythmic feeling of the process.
If in her early video works narrative is almost absent, and most of her videos are actually video installations, the recent videos are more engaged with story telling. The artist continues to play, but this time with personal archives and the memories they contain.
Motion, speed, lightness and weightlessness are parameters characterize Diana Hakobyan’s new canvases. Electric industrial landscapes streaking with incredible speed make you forget them belong to a canvas. A link is born between several media realities giving birth to a new painting that embeds drawing and photo elements.
Diana’s works forces the viewer not just to follow but to desire to be taken to this enviable reality saturated with bright fantastic colors from unknown future or known but undeniably desired past. The lightness of flights and falls of depicted figures allows them to fuse with the environment.
These canvases can be referred to as an experiment of its own kind to portray various moods. In these can you see hues of loneliness, strive to overcome obstacles, desire to rush forwards at high speed, or, the contrary, to stop the time.
Hakobyan has exhibited widely in Europe and Armenia. In 2004 she was awarded for the best video art at the Golden Apricot International Film Festival, Yerevan, Armenia. In 2012 she was artist in residence at Lenikus Sammlung International and one of her works was included in Lenikus Collection International, Vienna, Austria.
Exhibitions
2003 – The Last East European Show, Museum of contemporary art, Belgrade, Serbia
2003 – Adieu Parajanov: Contemporary Art from Armenia, Vienna, Austria
2004 – Solo show, ACCEA, Yerevan
2006 – Videoabend, Stadtpark Gallery, Krems, Austria
2007 – Armenie mon amie”, Modern Art Museum, Lyon, France
2008 – Text & Image, Basement, Vienna, Austria
2009 – Transitland. Video art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009, InterSpace Association, Sofia, Budapest, Berlin
2010 – In the Dark, The Moving Image, Spokane Falls Community College, Spokane Falls Community College, Spokane, Washington
2011 – Vienna Art Fair, Vienna, Austria
2012 – “Temporary Status”, Roda Sten, Gothenburg, Sweden
2014 – Re-Museum, National Gallery, Tbilisi, Georgia
2014 – Solo show, Dalan Gallery, Yerevan, Armenia
2015 – When friendship becomes art, ArtBasis, Yerevan
