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To like Anna Boghiguian’s work, one must embrace its messy, grimy quality. In an interview for Bidoun magazine conducted with Robert Shapazian on the terrace of her home in Egypt, the Armenian-Egyptian artist discussed these very elements in her work. ‘I think it’s necessary to show we are doing art for the masses of the world’, she said while suggesting that her work was not about depicting what Shapazian termed ‘cleanliness, order, clarity’, and referring to her lifelong preoccupation with history and the impact of imperialism.
In Boghiguian’s first solo exhibition in the United States, The Loom of History, at the New Museum, the besmirched quality of her art set the tone for her show. Yellow hand-painted texts resembling hastily scribbled cheat sheets adorned the black walls of the gallery. They revealed Boghiguian’s acute investigation of history through her poetic referral to the ear—as the first organ to register the oppression of emperors and the destruction of culture.
The ear listens
The ear is one lobe of The Brain
but another dissects the information received by the ear.
and searches for the truth
assuming what is received is false or an illusion…
The theme of inequality loomed large in Boghiguian’s exhibition and was conveyed through numerous highly charged emotive impressions of world politics that reference contemporary far-right nationalism, as well as wars, demonstrations, and colonial crusades through the centuries. A series of surreal collages on paper, In the World: East and West, North and South 1 (2017), consisting of paper cut-outs, text, and painted forms displayed in wooden beehive frames, depicted autocrats like Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi, sheikhs, Mao, and Donald Trump in grisly settings filled