Nairy Baghramian fuses mechanical and anthropomorphic forms to create perplexing sculptural objects. Her work envisions sculpture as a hybrid creature. Neither fully mechanical nor completely corporeal, Baghramian’s objects are difficult to pin down. Dwindlers, a series of glass appendages exhibited along the exterior corridor of the Arsenale, forces the question: “What is it that we are looking at? A collection of damaged ventilation ducts or monstrous intestines? Decorative ornamentation or a ruinous structure?”.
In the Central Pavilion, she is showing Maintainers (2019), a collage of interdependent sculptural elements in tightly assembled groupings (raw casted aluminium pressed tightly up against wax forms that are supported by a cork bar and lacquered braces). Solid and obstinate, the collage of forms animates a dynamic tension between material support and attack – without the cork and lacquered braces the work could potentially collapse.
