like a bird’s wake...
Identity / Identities between bridges and maps


from Barbara Höffer (Copyright)

Silvina Der-Merguerditchian is a hoarder and a cartographer. Her finds – as heterogeneous as they may seem at first glance – are all signs, de-signations of the complexity of identity. The artist’s nomadic approach, frequently her microscopic scrutiny, transform details – model-like portrayals of human DNA or fragments of a city street map into idiosyncratic, inimitable landscapes and textures. She creates a cartogram which constantly suggests new ways to relate and depict the intimate relationships between collective memory and individual experience.

The images presented by Silvina Der-Merguerditchian tell stories – either through a bold synthesis of various codes and techniques or as a sober inventory in the esthetic tradition of an archive. ID cards, those fingerprints in letters and numbers and records of human existence, become memorials by virtue of their serial arrangement. Nevertheless, in her work ”Wall East” it is precisely the empty spaces, the lack of officially sanctioned identity, which reveal the essence of an individual destiny. However, all the authorities have to do is to stamp the document to invalidate an individual’s identity.

In her installation, ”My Unification”, the artist reconstructs her own history with the help of official records – residence permits, working papers and ID cards are excessively magnified and projected on a canvas, giving them pictorial status. The tissue-like background of these records appears as a standard matrix. Stamps and inscriptions have left their marks thereas well, but they are enhanced, obliterated and/or counteracted by diagrams from the field of reproductive medicine. These serve as metaphors of an unfolding organic process. Depictions of sperm, the uterus and a fetus in the womb engage in an ambivalent interaction with the claim to catalogability of life as an instrument political domination.

The artist commutes between two cultures and identities. She grew up in Argentina and lives in Berlin. But her own biography is not the only reason why she plays an intermediary role. Silvina is of Armenian descent and describes the Armenians as a bridge which links Europe and Asia geographically and moreover as a persecuted people whose self-perception as mediators and communicators gives them a desperately needed raison d’être. The leitmotif of bridgebuilding – connecting the unrelated – is the common thread in Silvina’s most recent works. The scene of these encounters is Berlin, a symbol of division and the incompatibility of two systems. The triptych ”The Unraveller” is a symbolic umbilical between the two halves of the once-divided city. The consciously selected religious aura of the work gives the viewer a chance to express heartfelt wishes for the city of Berlin. Instead of depicting ”The Wall in Berliners’ Heads”, the artist builds bridges of fingerprints and IDs. Their disarray suggests the splitting as well as the expansion of identity. The ornamental chaining of one and the same collective record of identity, like the lineup of socialist handshakes in ”Bridges to Heaven” and the Brandenburg Gate in ”Las Puertas”, is an important stylistic tool, which blurs the border between symbols and ornaments. It can be interpreted as a trace of the ornamental element in Armenian art. This people’s native creativity is echoed in a different way in the crochet art Silvina employs in weaving photographic keepsakes and official documents into popular patterns.

Silvina pursures the knot-tying theme, the meshing of unlikely combinations by superimposing various layers and structures and combining extremely heterogeneous techniques such as marrying computer printouts with crayon to create newer and newer and bolder and bolder material syntheses. Identity is a constant patchwork of collective and individual memory, a puzzle of unequal, mismatched parts. But never random, always inimitable.