Qanun archives

In the video works QANUN ARCHIVES Der Meguerditchian uses the traditional stringed instrument to explore how cultural heritage transcends its origins and creates universal resonances. She traces the instrument’s jour-neys and the stories of the people who are connected to it: from Istanbul to Paris, from Buenos Aires to Berlin, from Cairo to Munich, from Cilicia to Armenia. In the narratives, personal stories and pla-ces intertwine to create harmonious and dissonant sounds.

The films offer a prismatic view of the transformative power of the qanun, as well as the lives of its musicians, which are marked by loss and resilience, belonging and community. In the series Seman-tic fields, Silvina Der Meguerditchian explores the relationship bet-ween language, concept and material. Using holes and threads, she embroiders words into paper, modulating concepts and their meanings and giving them a physicality of their own. This process creates a pictorial surface that dissolves into hanging threads — a reference to the osmotic properties of language. Language is not rigid, but thrives on connections, absorbing influences from different contexts, allowing meanings to flow into one another and evolving through exchange with other languages, cultures and perspectives. (Text by Lusin Reinsch & Barbara Höffer)