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Critics' Forum
Visual Arts
The House on Wheels: Alina Mnatsakanian's Search for "Home"
By Ramela Grigorian Abbamontian
How do most Armenians, having crossed a number of borders and
encountered many homes, construct a diasporic identity? Can the
diasporic Armenian live in one place and still be part of another - a
historic homeland, a site of origin, a prior home? Post-colonial
theorists Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, in
defining "exile" with regard to diasporic peoples, wonder if "home"
is "[i]n the place of birth (nateo), in the displaced cultural
community into which the person is born, or in the nation-state in
which this diasporic community is located" (Key Concepts in Post-
colonial Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 93). These
are questions that burden many Armenian artists as well, including
Alina Mnatsakanian.
Mnatsakanian's installations have been exhibited and her performance
pieces have had a run in Los Angeles over the last several years.
Mnatsakanian's work continues to live online, asking questions we
have yet to answer. Her work engages the issues of "home"
and "homeland" as well as the incessant movement across borders and
the encountering of many cultures. Mnatsakanian's personal history
inspired many of her pieces: she was born and raised in Iran (to
Russian-Armenian and Iranian-Armenian parents) but left for Paris at
the onset of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. After pursuing an art
education in Paris for several years, she settled in Los Angeles in
1983. After twenty-two years and several sporadic trips to Armenia,
she relocated once more, in September 2005, to Switzerland.
Mnatsakanian's installation, House on Wheels (2000), confronts the
issue of constant movement and hybrid identity. The installation
incorporates a wooden structure, audio recordings, and projected
images on the wall, all of which together create a multi-media and
multi-sensory space of engagement. Hanging inside the house-shaped
wooden frame are four large transparencies representing homes and
cultures the artist has encountered: Iran, France, the United States,
and Armenia. Each home is referenced with very specific iconography,
which includes such things as identification cards, passport photos,
metro maps, visas, and citizenship papers - all of them signifiers of
movement, belonging/not belonging, and the creation of "home."
Mnatsakanian considers her "homeland" Iran as well as Armenia,
explaining, "It's like a kid who has divorced parents," referring to
the sense of attachment one feels to more than one place (home) and
implying an involuntary separation from an initial source of
origin. Even though Mnatsakanian cites her strongest connections to
her birthplace of Iran and to Armenia (noticeably the most colorful
transparencies), she had created the home structure for Armenia
without ever having visited the country - emphasizing my earlier
suggestion that "homeland" is an imagined place for many Armenians.
When the imagined place was transformed into a real one during her
first visit, in 2001, Mnatsakanian recalled: "I kind of felt like I
had been there before, like I belonged there."
Mnatsakanian's structure is merely the frame of a house - no walls,
no roof, no foundation, no other reinforcements. The skeletal
structure, transparent houses, and the fact that it is on wheels once
more point to the impermanent and mobile nature of the Diasporan, who
has changed homes a number of times and whose identity, even in the
present, is still not fixed. Interestingly, R. B. Kitaj, an
American-born artist of Jewish descent living in England, suggests a
similar experience of immigrant life as displacement, quite apart
from actual physical or geographic movement. In First Diasporist
Manifesto (1989), he explains that his identity was "born from the
amalgamation of dislocation, rupture, and a hybrid self which exists -
and paints - in two or more societies at once." Clearly, the sense
of a displaced identity is not exclusive to the Armenian diaspora -
it reflects the larger immigrant experience.
Mnatsakanian's installation layers this sense of displacement into
her installation. A ten-minute video loop, evoking the notion of
home and movement that are central to the installation, is projected
onto the back wall, casting the structural form of the house itself
on the wall. The video is a layered collage of various scenes with a
superimposed audio component - giving the viewer a multi-sensory
experience similar to the disorientation engendered by displacement.
Mnatsakanian's own voice plays in the background, her words often
muddled, disrupting any sense of clarity and denoting, as the artist
herself writes, "confusion related to the multi-cultural existence."
In the audio portion of the installation, the artist briefly recounts
the specific experience related to each respective country: a
childhood in Iran; art school in France; adulthood in America; and an
imagined home in Armenia. These narratives are delivered in the
languages of the specific country and include a corresponding song in
the background. Mnatsakanian also recites the following quote by the
Iranian-born Armenian-American author Hagop Karapents in all four
languages - Armenian, Farsi, French, and English - identifying her
many homes: "Everyone goes from one place to another to get home.
Some people who go from one place to another never get home. Some
others get home, but always stay in exile."
The key images projected on the back wall reinforce the notion of
constant movement and the attempt to create a home. The
identification card is the identifying marker of newcomers to the
United States. Its rather paradoxical moniker - "Resident Alien" -
denotes someone who lives in the States but does not quite yet enjoy
the full benefits of citizenship, in other words, one who does not
quite yet belong. The next segment shows the repeated movement of a
pair of hands putting up a miniature house, its collapse, and its
rebuilding- the narrative loop representing visually the many homes
built and rebuilt by Diasporans. In the following segment, people at
Union Station, in downtown Los Angeles, are hurriedly walking from
one place to another. The final projection is of a set of hands
protectively and reverentially cupping soil. Could this be
Mnatsakanian's - or any Diasporan's - attempt to capture a piece of
the land, to render it a "homeland"? Or does it express the desire
to claim a certain land as one's own, in a paradoxical attempt to
halt the movement inherent in the diasporic experience?
In the statement describing the installation, Mnatsakanian elaborates
on this temporality, uprootedness and the endless search for
a "home":
. . . Sense of belonging to a place, a home or a homeland, is a
natural feeling. When one abandons the homeland, the sense of
belonging becomes abstract and sometimes unattainable. Duality or
plurality is a feeling created in such circumstances as a result of
various cultural influences. It can be enriching, yet differences
and contrasts may also create confusion. A person with a multi-
cultural upbringing might feel alienated in a society that is
prominently from a single cultural background. One way of facing
this issue is to completely conform to the new culture. Another way
is to find a possible coexistence.
Mnatsakanian, it seems, recognizes the challenges of multiple
belonging ultimately by embracing her diasporan identity as multi-
dimensional, what we might call a "transnational" self inhabiting
several identities at once.
House on Wheels has been exhibited at Neuchtel, Switzerland,
California State University, Los Angeles, and the Sam Francis Gallery
(Crossroads School, Santa Monica). You can view Mnatsakanian's art
on her website at http://alinamn.com/.
All Rights Reserved: Critics' Forum, 2008. Exclusive to the Armenian
Reporter.
Ramela Grigorian Abbamontian is an Assistant Professor of Art History
at Pierce College. She is also a PhD candidate in Art History at
UCLA.
You can reach her or any of the other contributors to Critics' Forum
at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
in this series are available online at www.criticsforum.org. To sign
up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
www.criticsforum.org/join. Critics' Forum is a group created to
discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.
Visual Arts
The House on Wheels: Alina Mnatsakanian's Search for "Home"
By Ramela Grigorian Abbamontian
How do most Armenians, having crossed a number of borders and
encountered many homes, construct a diasporic identity? Can the
diasporic Armenian live in one place and still be part of another - a
historic homeland, a site of origin, a prior home? Post-colonial
theorists Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, in
defining "exile" with regard to diasporic peoples, wonder if "home"
is "[i]n the place of birth (nateo), in the displaced cultural
community into which the person is born, or in the nation-state in
which this diasporic community is located" (Key Concepts in Post-
colonial Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 93). These
are questions that burden many Armenian artists as well, including
Alina Mnatsakanian.
Mnatsakanian's installations have been exhibited and her performance
pieces have had a run in Los Angeles over the last several years.
Mnatsakanian's work continues to live online, asking questions we
have yet to answer. Her work engages the issues of "home"
and "homeland" as well as the incessant movement across borders and
the encountering of many cultures. Mnatsakanian's personal history
inspired many of her pieces: she was born and raised in Iran (to
Russian-Armenian and Iranian-Armenian parents) but left for Paris at
the onset of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. After pursuing an art
education in Paris for several years, she settled in Los Angeles in
1983. After twenty-two years and several sporadic trips to Armenia,
she relocated once more, in September 2005, to Switzerland.
Mnatsakanian's installation, House on Wheels (2000), confronts the
issue of constant movement and hybrid identity. The installation
incorporates a wooden structure, audio recordings, and projected
images on the wall, all of which together create a multi-media and
multi-sensory space of engagement. Hanging inside the house-shaped
wooden frame are four large transparencies representing homes and
cultures the artist has encountered: Iran, France, the United States,
and Armenia. Each home is referenced with very specific iconography,
which includes such things as identification cards, passport photos,
metro maps, visas, and citizenship papers - all of them signifiers of
movement, belonging/not belonging, and the creation of "home."
Mnatsakanian considers her "homeland" Iran as well as Armenia,
explaining, "It's like a kid who has divorced parents," referring to
the sense of attachment one feels to more than one place (home) and
implying an involuntary separation from an initial source of
origin. Even though Mnatsakanian cites her strongest connections to
her birthplace of Iran and to Armenia (noticeably the most colorful
transparencies), she had created the home structure for Armenia
without ever having visited the country - emphasizing my earlier
suggestion that "homeland" is an imagined place for many Armenians.
When the imagined place was transformed into a real one during her
first visit, in 2001, Mnatsakanian recalled: "I kind of felt like I
had been there before, like I belonged there."
Mnatsakanian's structure is merely the frame of a house - no walls,
no roof, no foundation, no other reinforcements. The skeletal
structure, transparent houses, and the fact that it is on wheels once
more point to the impermanent and mobile nature of the Diasporan, who
has changed homes a number of times and whose identity, even in the
present, is still not fixed. Interestingly, R. B. Kitaj, an
American-born artist of Jewish descent living in England, suggests a
similar experience of immigrant life as displacement, quite apart
from actual physical or geographic movement. In First Diasporist
Manifesto (1989), he explains that his identity was "born from the
amalgamation of dislocation, rupture, and a hybrid self which exists -
and paints - in two or more societies at once." Clearly, the sense
of a displaced identity is not exclusive to the Armenian diaspora -
it reflects the larger immigrant experience.
Mnatsakanian's installation layers this sense of displacement into
her installation. A ten-minute video loop, evoking the notion of
home and movement that are central to the installation, is projected
onto the back wall, casting the structural form of the house itself
on the wall. The video is a layered collage of various scenes with a
superimposed audio component - giving the viewer a multi-sensory
experience similar to the disorientation engendered by displacement.
Mnatsakanian's own voice plays in the background, her words often
muddled, disrupting any sense of clarity and denoting, as the artist
herself writes, "confusion related to the multi-cultural existence."
In the audio portion of the installation, the artist briefly recounts
the specific experience related to each respective country: a
childhood in Iran; art school in France; adulthood in America; and an
imagined home in Armenia. These narratives are delivered in the
languages of the specific country and include a corresponding song in
the background. Mnatsakanian also recites the following quote by the
Iranian-born Armenian-American author Hagop Karapents in all four
languages - Armenian, Farsi, French, and English - identifying her
many homes: "Everyone goes from one place to another to get home.
Some people who go from one place to another never get home. Some
others get home, but always stay in exile."
The key images projected on the back wall reinforce the notion of
constant movement and the attempt to create a home. The
identification card is the identifying marker of newcomers to the
United States. Its rather paradoxical moniker - "Resident Alien" -
denotes someone who lives in the States but does not quite yet enjoy
the full benefits of citizenship, in other words, one who does not
quite yet belong. The next segment shows the repeated movement of a
pair of hands putting up a miniature house, its collapse, and its
rebuilding- the narrative loop representing visually the many homes
built and rebuilt by Diasporans. In the following segment, people at
Union Station, in downtown Los Angeles, are hurriedly walking from
one place to another. The final projection is of a set of hands
protectively and reverentially cupping soil. Could this be
Mnatsakanian's - or any Diasporan's - attempt to capture a piece of
the land, to render it a "homeland"? Or does it express the desire
to claim a certain land as one's own, in a paradoxical attempt to
halt the movement inherent in the diasporic experience?
In the statement describing the installation, Mnatsakanian elaborates
on this temporality, uprootedness and the endless search for
a "home":
. . . Sense of belonging to a place, a home or a homeland, is a
natural feeling. When one abandons the homeland, the sense of
belonging becomes abstract and sometimes unattainable. Duality or
plurality is a feeling created in such circumstances as a result of
various cultural influences. It can be enriching, yet differences
and contrasts may also create confusion. A person with a multi-
cultural upbringing might feel alienated in a society that is
prominently from a single cultural background. One way of facing
this issue is to completely conform to the new culture. Another way
is to find a possible coexistence.
Mnatsakanian, it seems, recognizes the challenges of multiple
belonging ultimately by embracing her diasporan identity as multi-
dimensional, what we might call a "transnational" self inhabiting
several identities at once.
House on Wheels has been exhibited at Neuchtel, Switzerland,
California State University, Los Angeles, and the Sam Francis Gallery
(Crossroads School, Santa Monica). You can view Mnatsakanian's art
on her website at http://alinamn.com/.
All Rights Reserved: Critics' Forum, 2008. Exclusive to the Armenian
Reporter.
Ramela Grigorian Abbamontian is an Assistant Professor of Art History
at Pierce College. She is also a PhD candidate in Art History at
UCLA.
You can reach her or any of the other contributors to Critics' Forum
at [email protected]. This and all other articles published
in this series are available online at www.criticsforum.org. To sign
up for a weekly electronic version of new articles, go to
www.criticsforum.org/join. Critics' Forum is a group created to
discuss issues relating to Armenian art and culture in the Diaspora.