Anna Boghiguian : Conversations - Viewing Room

In her ground floor installation, Boghiguian extends Lispector’s existential reflections into a contained space where drawings, sculptures, plants, and earth stare at and expose each other. The cockroach in Anna Boghiguian's installation echoes an episode in the novel "The Passion According to G.H." (1964), where the main character's discovery of the insect in a closet marks the beginning of an interrupted flow of thoughts, translating the profound introspection experienced by the protagonist.

The cockroach is also a symbol of survival and resistance facing the much less resilient human. The wax used in her figures also points out to the animal nature, particularly the bee’s sophisticated, non-human social organization. Focusing on the encounter itself rather than in a particular story, Boghiguian’s nomad cut-outs and drawings reflect on the fragile borders and the mystery that surrounds communication between nature, living matter and humans.

On the second floor, Boghiguian engages in an imaginary conversation with Virginia Woolf and her novel “To the Lighthouse” (1927) which takes place during the chaos of the First World War. Woolf's way of writing interests Boghiguian because of its proximity to the writer's early pictorial activity. Woolf does not emphasize the development of a plot, but rather lingers on the description of environments and objects through an abstract and poetic language. A large dining table welcomes the visitor who is invited to join the conversation with the fictional guests of this feast.

Like a film strip displayed on the wall, the narrative is suspended by four silent panels indicating the Great War years until the beginning of the Egyptian revolution. Woolf's novel, set before and after the war, also explores different spatial and temporal perspectives. In her work, Boghiguian leaps historical timelines with her own experience and perception, using stories to capture a moment of personal and political introspection.

Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946, Cairo) grew up in Cairo and studied economics and political science at the local American university. She moved to Montreal to study art and music. Boghiguian’s work first came to international attention in 2012 at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel. Subsequently invited to exhibit at numerous international museums and art institutes, she has shown work at the biennials in Sharjah (2011), Istanbul (2015), Venice (2015), Santa Fe (2016), Sydney (2019) and at Manifesta 13 in Marseille (2020). Over the past five years, Anna Boghiguian has created solo exhibitions for Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2016), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2017), New Museum, New York (2017), Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2018); Tate St. Ives (2019) and The Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Belgium (2021). A solo exhibition of her work was presented very recently at Kunsthaus Bregenz (2022).

Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Tate Modern, London among others.

Several sails are suspended in the foyer. The colored linens are printed with drawings in repeat: the screen print depicts a group of people marching close together at a rally. Similar to ancient Egyptian renderings, the figures are drawn with large eyes. One person beats a drum while another, farther ahead, carries a flag.

Anna Boghiguian depicts political protest movements. Her works deal with servitude and rebellion, tyranny and the desire for freedom, leadership and liberation. Awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2015, Boghiguian has Armenian roots and grew up in Cairo, where she lives again today. Boghiguian is a politically interested and philosophically minded storyteller who links past and present, similar to the murdered Egyptian Nobel Prize for Literature winner Naguib Mahfouz, a close friend of hers for whom she designed a series of book covers. For her exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Boghiguian is exploring the revolutionary upheavals in France and the United States of the eighteenth century and the history of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Austria, and Egypt. The works on view in Bregenz were created specifically for the show. During a several-weeks-long residency in the city, the artist devoted herself to historical research, creating drawings and handwritten notes in the rooms of the neighboring post office building.

Exhibited on the first floor are life-sized cutout figures on a mirrored chessboard. Boghiguian outfitted the back side of the silhouettes with red or black plates and painted the front sides with wax paint. The artist developed the idea for the ensemble titled The Chess Game for kub in Venice in the spring of 2022. With this exhibition at the historic Scuola di San Pasquale, Kunsthaus Bregenz celebrated its twentyfifth anniversary, bringing together works by Otobong Nkanga and Anna Boghiguian, including the latter’s installation.

At the center of The Chess Game is the Austrian-born queen of France Marie Antoinette. She appears colorfully and lightly dressed, with a striking hat by her milliner and dressmaker, Rose Bertin, who is likewise represented as a character on the board. Marie Antoinette’s mother, Empress Maria Theresia, joins the ensemble next to her. Further figures include the artist Egon Schiele, shown with a mask protecting him against the Spanish flu; the Habsburg heir to the throne who was assassinated in Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand, with mustache and hunting rifle; Ferdinand I, king of Lombardy-Venetia in the nineteenth century; Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism; Sigmund Freud; and other historical notables. Appearing in the back of the chessboard is Aribert Heim, a figure of key importance for Boghiguian. Heim – like most of the people depicted here, of Austrian origin – was the camp physician at the Mauthausen concentration camp and known among the prisoners as “Dr. Death”. After the war, he spent several years in Germany before fleeing to Egypt, where he lived undisturbed in a hotel in Cairo until his death. For her solo show in Bregenz, Boghiguian expanded the chess ensemble: nine figures now float above the chessboard, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoi, Rudolf Steiner, Stefan Zweig, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Josephine Baker.

Displayed on the second floor are over a hundred drawings that Boghiguian made in advance of the exhibition, some of which show Heim’s residence in Cairo. A number of the drawings were created on a research trip in Berlin, where Heim owned an apartment building, others while the artist made a visit to France. At Versailles, Boghiguian drew the signing of the peace treaty in the palace’s Hall of Mirrors, which ended World War I, as well as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose books inspired Marie Antoinette.

The drawings also include images of a guillotine, scenes from the Haitian Revolution, and the back of the Statue of Liberty. The figures crowding the images are drawn in a caricature-like manner and unfailingly rendered with expressive lines. The color scheme in the works alternates between pale opaque white and luminous color. Boghiguian’s painting technique recalls that of Honoré Daumier or the expressive gestures of James Ensor. Many of her sheets show the contrast between political leaders and the people at their mercy. Next to a caricature of Aribert Heim, whose rows of teeth Boghiguian painted double, appears an impressive triple portrait against an empty background: Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky in dirty black and gray.

Installed on the third floor is a circular, mirrored platform; a disco ball bathes the space in an atmospheric light. On the ceiling hangs a model of a guillotine – an instrument of capital punishment, reminiscent in its presentation of the electric chair in Andy Warhol’s silkscreen series. In this work, too, Boghiguian addresses the terror unleashed by ruling elites, the slaughter of political opponents, the competing of ideologies and ideas that goes hand in hand with violence. A text written by the artist and plays as a sound piece in the space. Once again, Marie Antoinette and Jean-Jacques Rousseau appear as protagonists, but so do the people in the mob who fought against hunger and domination.