Farrah Karapetian, MFA

 

Farrah Karapetian is an artist and writer who works on bodily memory and individual agency in the face of authority and loss. In Artforum in 2012, Natilee Harren wrote that "Karapetian explicitly recodes photography, turning an act of reproduction into one of production." Her work "marries two traditions in photography — that of the staged picture and of the image made without a camera" (Los Angeles Times 2015.) In this unique combination of tactics, Leah Ollman identified a particular test of photography's conventional relationship to fact, writing in Art in America in 2017 that Karapetian shows "that her pictures, faith-inducing indexes of the real, derive from a fabrication, an exercise in artifice." Her videos, photograms, and the sculptural negatives she makes en route to the photograms' exposure move in and out of abstraction and figuration and "disrupt and call attention to our era’s deeply entrenched response of permitting the constant newsfeed of documentary to slide by us as political ephemera" (Georgia Review 2015). At this time in history, especially, Karapetian's work represents "moving affirmations of community in which erasure serves only to strengthen a message of solidarity" (Los Angeles Times, 2019.)

Her work is in public collections that include the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco. Among other grants, she is a recipient of a 2021 COLA Fellowship from the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of Los Angeles; a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia (2018); a Pollock-Krasner Award (2017); and a California Community Foundation Mid-Career Artist Fellowship (2014). Institutional exhibitions include Time Share, Performa (2020); The Fabric of Felicity, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2018); Synthesize, MOCA Jacksonville (2017); Light Play: Experiments in Photography, 1970 to the Present, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); A Matter of Memory, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2016); The Surface of Things, Houston Center for Photography (2016); and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2016.)

 

Karapetian regards the role of the artist to include public thinking, and her writing about visual culture has been published widely. She is the recipient of a Warhol Arts Writers Grant (2013) for her blog Housing Projects, about the house in and as contemporary art. In 2021, she is an editorial collaborator on the Lisbon-based Archivo Platform, working with international scholars to unpack the "Mythologies of the 21st century." Her lectures centering the subject's agency in lens-based histories include "Centering the Post-Soviet Subject" at Harvard University's Davis Center (2020), as well as public research into native self-representation in North Africa and the Middle East. Her curatorial work has included finding connections between Surrealist and contemporary explorations of the body and its politics. In each of these and other public roles, Karapetian's practice rhymes with that of her studio: encouraging subjects to engage in the process of their own representation, even while collaborating with the artist's complex and evolving language.