Melik Ohanian

Though Le Plateau is just one of the fifteen sites for French artist Melik Ohanian’s exhibition “From the Voice to the Hand,” the photographs, sculptures, and installations he has selected for this space nonetheless provide several key insights into the project as a whole. Betraying Ohanian’s concern with language, history, and time, five new and recent works are conceptually linked to the full project, installed at a range of venues in and around Paris, including a school, a swimming-pool compound, and the recently inaugurated Museum of Immigration. Reversing the visitor’s usual experience of Le Plateau, Ohanian has closed its customary entrance and moved its point of access to a space typically positioned as the last room of the center’s exhibitions. In this area, four light boxes that constitute Return from Memory, 2008, gently pulsate in succession, evoking stop-motion animation, with images of a rickety suspended footbridge. Depicting a symbol of passage, the black-and-white photographs investigate movement through both space and time. Snaking through a series of narrow spaces is Ohanian’s 10,000 Letters, 2008: illuminated stacks of plaster alphabetic characters drawn from the writings of postmodern thinkers, organized beneath simple plastic plaques indicating the passages’ sources—Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida. The phrases referenced are illegible—each letter has been extracted from the quoted text and grouped with its kind—but they remain unmistakably authored and heavy with connotation. The last room visitors encounter has been darkened—the lights turned off above the reception desk and a nearby bookshelf—while Ohanian’s clock Trouble Time(s), 2007, looms over the bolted entrance doors. The timepiece’s face is cloudy, and its second hand glides around the dial at an inaccurate pace. Throughout, an intense stillness accompanies a palpable threat to the status quo.