Global Storyteller

Black and reflective squares alternate, covering the entire floor and forming an oversized chessboard. On it, life-size figures with red or black backs cast colourful counter-images on the ground. But who exactly can be seen here? Marie Antoinette, the French queen who was beheaded in 1793, or Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne who was murdered in 1914, are easy to identify. Then there is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bertha von Suttner and Sigmund Freud. An absurd cabinet of historical figures whose masquerades are reminiscent of the paintings of Belgian painter James Ensor. But who is king, queen and pawn here?

In "The Chess Game", Anna Boghiguian invites us onto the board of history with a seemingly light gesture. The installation, which was first presented in 2022 at the historic Scuola di San Pasquale in Venice and later at Kunsthaus Bregenz and elsewhere, is a perfect example of the artist's working method. She often spends time at the respective exhibition venue in advance, researching the site-specific history and developing or expanding her works accordingly. In doing so, she playfully moves historical figures forwards and backwards to make invisible threads visible, for example from Marie Antoinette's fondness for opulent cotton fabrics to the Haitian Revolution.

Inhalt The frank look at historical biographies is a recurring element in Boghiguian's work. One example of this is Friedrich Nietzsche, whose nervous breakdown, allegedly triggered by a maltreated horse, she explored at an exhibition in Turin, or whose disparaging attitude towards lepers she depicted in her drawings in "Nietzsche and the Lepers". In contrast, things become completely gloomy in the face of a figure such as Aribert Heim, camp doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp, known among the prisoners as Dr Tod and one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals. After the Second World War, he emigrated to Egypt under a false name and lived there unmolested in a hotel in Cairo until his death. A story of particular interest to the artist, who was born in the Egyptian capital in 1946 to Armenian parents.

Boghiguian spent her childhood in Cairo, where she studied political science and economics at the American University until 1969, before transferring to Concordia University in Montreal to study fine arts and music. Her broad theoretical training was followed by several years of travelling, which marked the beginning of a nomadic life as an artist. Her pictures, collages and texts, recorded in notebooks, grew over time into a very personal map of the world. It formed the pictorial and linguistic foundation for an extensive oeuvre of figurative murals, drawings, paintings, photographs, large-format installations and over seventy artist's books, which Boghiguian can look back on today. The salt trade routes marked on canvas ("The Salt Traders", 2015) or the flowering cotton plants between backdrop-like drawings ("A Short Long History", 2019) still seem like walk-in, subjective maps on which the artist links universal connections with her personal experiences. Past and present, literature and politics intertwine in her work to create a sensitive view of the present of a globally united humanity and its options for the future.

In recent years, the cross-cultural works of this marvellously non-conformist artist, who is represented by the Berlin gallery KOW, among others, have received increasing international recognition. Her invitation to Documenta 13 in 2012 and her participation in numerous biennials are testament to this. Boghiguian was also one of the 16 artists and collectives from the diaspora who explored the history of their ancestors and their identity at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015 under the label "Armenity/Haiyutioun", for which they were awarded the Golden Lion for the best national pavilion. The next major honour will follow in November with the Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig, which is also linked to an exhibition from 9 November 2024 to 30 March 2025.

But what is the special quality of her work? Perhaps the way in which the unconditional urge for freedom and the protest against all forms of tyranny are manifested in a poetic visual language. For example, there are drawings of protagonists of the French and Russian revolutions against a blood-red background, Peter the Great and Vladimir Putin bathing together in the Baltic Sea or Egon Schiele protecting himself from the Spanish flu with a mask. Historical cross-references, possibly more topical than ever. The reflective floor covering in "The Chess Game" thus fans out the personnel of world history in a double sense, allowing new perspectives on what is supposedly told. What at first glance appears to be a seemingly harmless backdrop turns out, on closer inspection, to be a sensitive observation of past crises and conflicts whose spirals of violence continue to this day. Or to put it in the words of the artist: "Great artworks happen whenever there is a whole situation of crisis."