Malabarista is a video installation by S. Der-Meguerditchian with sound by Thea Farhadian (San Francisco). Over two years ago Silvina Der-Meguerditchian captured images of a juggler she encountered in a public space. The footage remained in her computer until the exchange with Thea Farhadian. Malabarista, Spanish for 'juggler', speaks to a quality of in-betweenness - between photography and video, between movement and impediment, between abstraction and narrative, between a difficult past where it is challenging to stay connected to the events of history and the longing to remember. The work acts as a metaphor for the juggling of Armenian and Turkish stories. This history is so fragile that one is compelled to re-tell the story, but through another lens, and decades later. Silvina Der--Meguerditchian understands the artistic collaboration in Malabrista as part of a larger experiment, a process that seeks new, contemporary forms of expression for the current existence of the Diaspora. In the video the Armenian identity seems diverse and enigmatic, and arises in the intersection of constant motion and (further) development: patterns collapse and reconfigure together, disappear and return as images, as acts, as music...

Text by Barbara Höffer