Haig Aivazian

Haig Aivazian (1980, Lebanon) is a visual artist based in Beirut. His work ranges across the moving image, sculpture/installation, drawing, and performance art, and explores how power integrates, affects, and displaces people, objects, animals, landscape, and architecture. From 2020 to 2022, he was artistic director of the Beirut Art Center, where he founded and directed the digital publication thederivative.org.

His residency project explores the dynamic between darkness and artificial light, a powerful beam that shapes and reflects transactions of power and control in modern life. From its origins in policing, street lighting – a coding of the links between darkness and crime – has become a central tool of urban planning and public infrastructure. Haig Aivazian uses the magic lantern as basic material and tells the legal stories of who possesses and who is dispossessed of the right to inhabit the night, and of the emancipatory rituals of those driven to hide or to adopt reduced visibility.

Portrait © Myriam Boulos