Sonia Balassanian

Wars and crisis areas are a constant feature of Sonia Balassanian’s work. Her concern in her more recent video works are the ramifications of a general war (albeit never referred to as such) being waged against the individual. The images of Balassanian’s multipart video work “Who Is the Victim?” for the Pavilion of the Republic of Armenia at the 52nd Venice Biennale tap into this universalized misery and suffering of war.
Nina Möntmann

My work explores and links my multi-faceted identity with the physical and perceptual world surrounding me and relates intimate images to broader social and cultural issues including gender identity and relations, the aftermath of war, and the role of the individual, especially the individual artist, in today’s society.

The simultaneous development of several ideas made possible by the video art format mirrors the rapidly shifting and essentially unresolved nature of those issues. 

My language operates at a certain level of symbolic abstraction in order to evoke universal human experiences from specific situations.

Following are dialogues from “Who is the Victim?”:

The first is memories of the wife of a fallen freedom-fighter, and the second excerpts from diary of a conscript. These and similar situations are what affect my feelings on war and the pain and frustration caused by it…