Portrait

Hamlet Hovsepian is one of the key figures in Armenian contemporary art and one of the first artists in the USSR to have worked with video art. He says that he finds inspiration in the insignificant, in things that have no historical or social importance and normally escape our attention as completely unmemorable.

Hovsepian’s video experiments of the mid‑1970s consist of non‑narrative footage of people and objects around him (a girl biting her nails, a yawning boy scratching his back, electrical cables). A similar genre and aesthetic can be found in Andy Warhol’s work (for example Sleep (1963), featuring sleeping poet John Giorno), which was obviously inaccessible to Hovsepian, who had only heard about it from others. But if Warhol wanted to capture the new everyday—the beauty and simplicity of mass consumption, as we can see in Chelsea Girls (1966), which follows 12 protagonists living a leisurely life—Hovsepian is focused on existential questions such as “Where are we going?” and “Is life static or does it have a purpose?” ultimately returning to the eternal and unavoidable truth of “What has been will be again.” In works such as Portrait, Head, Yawning, Nail Biter, and Itch, the artist closely observes the simplest human actions, allowing events to unfold naturally, without unnecessary pathos. Standing somewhat apart is Untitled, in which Hovsepian’s friend methodically walks around a massive boulder—likely a metaphor for the cyclical nature of existence. At the same time, the video resonates with the social reality of the era of stagnation in the Soviet Union, which coincided with the formative years of Hovsepian as an artist.