Melik Ohanian

Melik Ohanian’s work Borderland – I Walked a Far Piece is conceived in a marginal, de-territorialised territory, on a floating New York rooftop, lit by a nocturnal bonfire, as a new huis clos. Bordeland is an open stage on which the artist presents characters from Rudolf Wurlitzer’s novel Flats, leaving them to get on with their lives in the present, mingling their travellers’ tales with those of other characters, migrants whom no one wants to take in anymore. Over the course of a single night, when the lights of the electric city seem to have gone out, Melik Ohanian weaves a resonant tapestry of fragmented rhythms, Beat poetry and the nomadic lives of these celestial vagrants.

DAYS, I See what I Saw and what I will See explores the notion of producing a continuous representation of space and a discontinuous representation of time. The film was shot over eleven days, from 24 February to 6 March 2011, in a Labor Camp in Sajaa, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Melik Ohanian built 100 meters of tracks to make traveling shots. Each day he installed the tracks and then filmed the 100 meters in approximately four minutes. The next day, he dismantled the tracks, re-assembled them and moved them 100 meters ahead – and film again. He did this for eleven consecutive days, shooting both during the day and at night. The incremental editing of the daily footage produced two singular films representing 1100 meters of space and forty-two minutes of time.

A constellation-like video project emerging from No Ghost Just a Shell, this work repositions the digital character Annlee as an unstable subject caught between authors, images, and borrowed narratives. Rather than offering a single viewpoint, the piece multiplies perspectives: Annlee becomes a vessel through which different artists test the limits of agency, voice, and representation in the age of licensed avatars. I Am Dreaming About a Reality? examines what happens when a character is freed from commercial authorship yet remains bound to the expectations projected onto her—an experiment in identity that hovers between animation, conceptual art, and philosophical inquiry.

Invisible Film reimagines Peter Watkins’s Punishment Park (1971), a radical anti-war film banned in both the UK and the US after the Vietnam War. Melik Ohanian replaces its images with a single static shot of a 35mm projector screening the censored film in daylight in the San Bernardino desert—its original location. Projected without a screen, the image disappears into the desert air, turning cinema itself into both subject and ghost.