Arpy Adamyan & Mary Amirkhanyan

b. 1985 & 1977, Armenia

Some bodies are facultative bodies; they are thrown out of the conventional understanding of well-being and prosperity as is customary in contemporary societies, where entertainment industry and the service sphere have turned out to be the pivotal metaphor for the ‘emancipation’ from the indivisibly collective strict obedience, which was common under the Soviets, and from the euphoria of the private self-assertion in the form of an uncritical pleasure syndrome. The disabled or ‘the defective bodies’, as metaphors for anti-aestheticism and unneededness, are in congruence with the woman’s inferiority in its prevailing and prevalent epithets: old age, plainness, childlessness.

The first demarche by these young women-artists became the gesture of marking – ‘certain space’. This certain space was the entrance of the Center for Contemporary Art, where a path was ordered for all those ‘certain bodies’ – disabled people, people with physical mutilation who are unable to move on their own without a wheelchair. The marked ‘threshold’ (the space was upholstered with a symbolic orange thread) is both a threshold of pain and mutilation. Arpi and Mary marked the symbolic ‘entrance’ as a sign of the hopelessness of the bodies which are given intellect and wit as ‘spiritual crutches’, and material well-being as a commodity.

— Susanna Gulamiryan

(Text: give(a)way catalogue, 2006)