Raffi Davtyan (Iran-Armenia)
Curator: Susanna Ghulamiry
International Festival #2 | Body Politics
Co-curator: FemLibrary
Raffi Davtyan’s project, titled “Human Doors,” features photo-figurative installations of human body figures in space. This bodily figurativeness is staged as an alternative “public sphere,” where through artistic expression, both the discourse on gender is revived and the phenomena of gender exclusion and systemic oppression are re-actualized. The installation transforms into a model of figures in “multiplicity,” depicting scenes imbued with subjective experiences and “gender anxiety.” Each figure appears as a bearer of a certain character, a persona focused on categorizing “different,” “other,” “strange” subjectivities, turning bodies into pure signs and markers in the cultural and social field.
The artist, through the gesture of the unmarked, unordered arrangement of figures, seems to strive for an “anarchic” space of absolute freedoms, a metaphor for an open field beyond the constraints of pressures and subjugations. While the project searches for paths and questions the possibility of freeing oneself from administrative-normative conventions, the “center of oppression” remains heavily dependent on each body.
Each bearer of individual identity, not insignificantly represented in the project, bears the burden of patriarchal heteronormative laws, such as phallocentrism. Each photo-figure presses a strange object for local viewers, a mechanical metal “kube” (the Persian word means something used to knock or hit). In the past, kubes in Iran served to signal and announce the arrival of guests; they were used to knock on doors. Kubes were also used for gender differentiation, each door knocker styled to resemble a phallus or vagina. In Iran, these were placed on private and public institutions’ doors and gates. Although technological innovations have rendered them practically obsolete, kubes remain present in the country’s social context, reflecting conservative customs and gender biases. Gender kubes began to be used with the spread of Islam. These symbols of gender differentiation produce different sound signals when knocked: male ones are low and muffled, female ones are high and ringing. Hosts would learn about the guest’s gender from the nature of the sound. If the visitor was a woman, she would be welcomed by someone of the same gender; otherwise, if the hosts knew of a male visitor, the women of the house would be required to cover themselves from head to toe.
In the project, the epistemological effect of using kubes as a tool for gender differentiation appears as follows: biological sex is subjected to social and cultural order, gender differentiation precedes the social, and is inevitably dependent on the social, leading to the highest point of subordination — “heteronormative law,” within which, as Judith Butler posits, subjectivity is performative and theatrically reproduces the dominant social norms of heteronormativity. The body is not confined to the physical; the end of the physical body opens a door to the social.
By using Persian kubes, the artist does not attempt to “localize” the issue. The “story” presented about body, sexuality, and subjectivity is largely directed towards the transnational, universal. The issue of gender is one of Raffi Davtyan’s pressing concerns, especially given the artist’s biographical factor and the country (Iran) in which he was born and lives.
The installation space transforms into a framework where “gender anxiety” seeks to disrupt the given world order and the steadfast hierarchy. The project is about escaping from and combating the center of oppression and pressures, and invites reflection on paths and thresholds that undermine the dominant discourse.
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Raffi Davtyan was born in 1971 in Isfahan (Iran) but developed as an artist in Yerevan, where he moved in 1996. In 2003, he graduated from the Sculpture Department of the Yerevan Academy of Fine Arts with a master’s degree.
Over the years, Raffi Davtyan also developed an interest in experimental photography, producing numerous photographic works with the human body and its multifaceted relations to social life as the central theme. Broadly speaking, Raffi’s artistic work can be characterized as a dialogue between various fields with traditional artistic practices, within and against them.
The year 2007 was particularly decisive for Raffi Davtyan’s artistic career when he began a fruitful collaboration with curator and art critic Susanna Ghulamiry, President of the Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory. This collaboration evolved into a series of major projects, starting with Raffi’s first gender project, “Human Doors.”
After returning to Tehran, Davtyan’s work shifted to exploring the broader biopolitical paradigm, its impact on the human body, and its discursive economy within the Iranian context. His political art project “The Angel’s Possibility,” presented at the Sharjah International Biennale in 2011 (project curator: Susanna Ghulamiry), was particularly typical of this perspective. Influenced by Giorgio Agamben’s contemporary definition of homo sacer and his questions about the nature of law and power, Raffi creates works that delve into the issues of power-religion relationships and the mechanisms where religion serves as a legitimization point for power.
Raffi Davtyan has had 4 solo exhibitions and participated in 21 group exhibitions. In 2004, he was recognized as a winner of the “International Photography Awards” competition (California, USA).
The exhibition is made possible with the financial support of the Kvinna til Kvinna Foundation. Thanks to the management of the Contemporary Art Museum of Yerevan for hosting the project. The art works realized within the framework of the festival span from the 1990s to the present, as recent feminist discussions emphasize the political importance of past creative reconstructions, especially on themes traditionally marginalized. Therefore, the retrospective nature of the exhibitions will contribute to the creation of an archive that includes not only the history of women’s, feminist art and criticism but also the activist movement from feminist and queer perspectives.
