Kamo Nigarian: Schizopolis

September 18, 2015 – December 20, 2015 "The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us."
Michel Foucault, 1977

The relationship between power and violence is the uniting theme of the eighteen works by Kamo Nigarian presented together for the first time in this exhibition (curator: Vigen Galstyan). 

Beginning from his early works as a designer in the 1970s, Nigarian took on a critical stance towards ideologies of state and mass culture. As a dissident artist who emerged in the last decades of the Soviet regime in Armenia, Nigarian was deeply concerned about humanity’s inherent capacity for violence and the hidden desire for power in us all. 

From poster and exhibition design to painting and photography, Nigarian’s work reflects on the underlying terror of societal and political structures. The exhibition charts his bold experimentation with stylistic legacies of expressionism, surrealism and pop-art as the artist searched for means to project his anxiety about the crisis of modern civilization. 

Like a chamber of horrors, Kamo Nigarian: Schizopolis invites us to look at this "negative" exposure of reality and contemplate the unconscious madness implanted in our everyday existence.

Exhibition Catalog