Sweet Repression of Solidarity/David Kareyan

Sweet Repression of Ideology

Author: David Kareyan

Place: ACCEA

Year: 2000

The performance "Sweet Repression of Ideology" was presented at the "Collapse of Illusions" exhibition. Sitting in a wheelchair, I read extracts devoted to national ideology from the books of two Armenian academicians published that year. Then, tearing pages, I threw them into a big pot and boiled them, offering the spectators to eat that dinner.

By giving the art a form of social complaint, I am trying to show the invisible, unformed and forbidden layers of social and psychological collisions. The crazy constructions of fanaticism and fundamentalism are often built on these layers—the revolutionary reconstruction of the agricultural-stockbreeding culture and industrial modernization cause hysteric-insane outbursts. We witness similar conflicts when the religious- philosophic national ideology "tending to the centre" bumps into "the body truth".