artBahrain:  Who is Zarouhie Abdalian? What are your origins and in what way have the historical and geographical setting influenced your art?

Zarouhie Abdalian : I am a New Orleanian now living in Oakland, CA. I share my name with my fraternal great-grandmother, an Armenian born in Harpoot, Turkey. These places privilege rootedness and a connection to the past, sometimes even at the expense of living fully in the present or being particularly concerned with the future. Of course, all places carry their pasts within them, and perhaps I am more sensitive to this when I work in new cities. This is not to say that my work necessarily refers to history; rather, I develop a relationship with a city’s past while working there, and I think this is in part because of my upbringing.

ab:  Can you tell us about your first move from New Orleans to California, what were the stress factors of moving and finding yourself in a new ‘art scene’?

ZA: I moved from New Orleans to Philadelphia in 2005 because of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Unfortunately, I don’t think I ever really found myself in Philadelphia’s art scene. It was difficult to connect with a new city to which I arrived without a community, so when I made the choice to move again in 2008, it was with the specific purpose of attending graduate school in San Francisco. In the US, I think graduate school—for better or worse—has become one of the best ways to immediately connect with a city’s art scene and develop a professional network. I don’t think I necessarily understood this when I was applying to schools; I simply wanted to focus on my work for two years within the context of a rigorous arts program. I graduated several years ago, but I’ve remained in the San Francisco/Oakland area in part because I do feel connected here and also because there are several art scenes here to think about and navigate.

ab: How did this experience influence your work?

ZA: Before leaving my hometown, my artwork was about specific people and communities within a very particular place, and that place was always New Orleans. Working in other cities, the influence of my hometown—its communities, landscapes, and histories—plays an important but less explicit role in my work. I think that moving between communities, artistic and otherwise, has broadened my understanding of my work and of place.

ab: What motivates or inspires you to create art?

ZA: Art can pose novel inquiries into the nature of things. It is important to ask questions, and I believe it’s important to develop new language for this purpose. Sometimes the process begets new things, but it’s just as interesting to displace something that already exists from one context to another so as to prompt a reevaluation of that context and its terms. There is no one way to think about or begin an artwork, and working on problems posed within an art practice is a good way to nurture creative thinking about things within and outside of art making.

ab:  What does winning the 2012 SECA Art Award mean to you?

ZA: SFMOMA gives the SECA Art Award, and since the museum will be closed for three years while renovating, this year’s prize was unique: artists were asked to submit proposals for offsite commissions in locations of our own choosing. In the review process, I proposed a project that I’ve been thinking about for some time but that likely couldn’t happen without institutional support. The SECA commission means that I can move forward with a context-specific project for downtown Oakland whose scope and scale are greater than any of my previous work. Having made site-specific pieces in various places abroad for a couple of years, I am gratified by the opportunity to do something significant in the city where I live and work.

Set for the Outside, 2010.
Frosted privacy window film and graphite on 24 windows.
8 x 40 feet.

ab: What were some of the challenges you faced working on Set for the Outside, 2010? What problems did you run into, and how did you have to adapt to the situation or circumstances?

ZA: Set for the Outside was a response to the campus of California College of the Arts (CCA), a private arts college that I attended in San Francisco. The school is located in a redesigned bus maintenance facility and abuts a lot on which a dilapidated bus-wash used to stand (it was torn down when CCA bought the lot only months after made this work).

In 2010, the bus wash and lot were used by communities outside of the school, including: those who lived in tents along the sidewalks and under the bus wash building, guys who would recycle parts of the actual building or work on bicycles in its shade, and laborers who waited daily at one corner of the lot. In my experience, the school did not prioritize their relationship with these communities or other communities in the neighborhood; these communities often seemed to be ignored.

I wanted to make a work that would prompt a reviewing of this existing environment but not be didactic or preachy. I also wanted to call attention to the landscape beyond the school without setting up a relationship where the art viewers became voyeurs.

Finally, I hoped to make a work that could be viewable from both sides. In the end, I made a somewhat formal work that transposes the shapes of two rows of broken windows from the bus wash onto two rows of windows of the school using a plastic material called “frosted privacy window film”. The work breaks up the existing view, and thus, asks the viewer to (re)consider that view.

ab: Do you know what your installation will look like before you begin making it or did you allow the work to develop on its own?

ZA: Before the work is made, I have an idea of what I want the work to look or sound like, how I want it to be experienced, and the ways I intend it to function. However, works made in context are inevitably the result of my negotiation with the material configuration of a site. The work is a product of my labor but also responds to the conditions under which it is viewed.

ab: How do you differentiate your approach to the issue of space from the two-dimensional surface to three-dimensional?

ZA: When working two-dimensionally, I’m not just concerned with the autonomous art object; I also think about how the work will be installed and the context in which it will appear. So rather than thinking of moving between dimensions, I think of it more like moving between making work that I will insert into a space and making work that uses a space as part of its material.

ab: How do you begin your projects – with the concept or with the site?

ZA: Most of the works begin with the site or context in which they will appear. Even those that begin with a concept don’t really take shape until there is a site. When I think of the material site, I also think of the time and place within which the work will appear.

ab: Because you create work in specific sites, how do you go about thinking of the materials you are going to use in a given space?

ZA: Often, I work with the features of a site that have a prescribed purpose such as gallery walls, lighting systems, or windows. Because of this, I am drawn to utilitarian or everyday materials. I keep some things around the studio that I fiddle with from time to time and that may later appear in a project. More often, however, a site will lead me to choose a new material that seems to make particular sense at the site.

ab: What is the hardest part in being an installation artist?

ZA: There are some very practical difficulties of working in a context-specific way since the work usually cannot be repeated. Most projects still feel like I’m building things from the ground up. Though there are certain sensibilities and ideas that run through all of the pieces, because of the way I work, I often have to learn to use new materials on site and during the installation. I think there is only so much planning that can be done beforehand because the interaction of the artwork and the site is what I’m interested in. The only way to really see this is to make the work.

Away Setting, 2012
Timers, lights, inaccessible split-level rooms.
More than one thousand possible instances over three months.
Presented in the MacMillan Building, Shanghai, China.

ab: What’s the most challenging piece you’ve done?

ZA: The most challenging piece I’ve done is Away Setting (2012), which was made for the San Francisco pavilion of the Shanghai Biennial. Much of the challenge had to do with the circumstances under which the work came to be: I’d planned a sculpture, but the space I planned for changed dramatically just before my arrival. Thus, I had very few resources, even less time, and I was attempting to determine what it might mean to work in a site-based way in Shanghai upon immediate arrival there. Perhaps it was crazy to try to work in this fashion, but the difficulties that I encountered in the process of producing the work became a part of it.

I chose to work with a part of the building that was inaccessible to viewers but could be seen through large storefront windows. The two-story space was once used for a café’s kitchen, but had been abandoned and decaying for over a decade. This space was literally turning to dust and sat unlit and off-limits to most viewers. For Away Setting, I ran electricity to the space and hung an array of simple light fixtures with fluorescent and incandescent bulbs of various intensities. The lights were hung throughout the depth of the space and were all set on timers; they lit the space in over one thousand different configurations over the three months it was installed. The light modulated the space over the day and night. This minimal operation to the space left it only slightly changed, but a perceptual shift could be registered.

It seemed to me that the people who were most familiar with the site were the men renting parking spaces just outside it and the guards, who’d been watching the empty building for years. These men almost immediately understood what I was up to and were, I believe, the primary audience of the work. Surely there was an explicit art audience as well; like many of my pieces, Away Setting is interested in addressing various publics.

ab:  Where do you imagine yourself and your work to be five years from now?

ZA: I’m not sure I have a very specific answer. I will be working with many of the same ideas and processes we’ve discussed here, but I think that there will be more collaborations.

ab:  Finally, What is your next project?

ZA: I am working on the SECA commission and a solo show opening in August at the Berkeley Art Museum, California.

ab