WATCH OUT #10: Jasmin Meinold on Beatrice Moumdjian

WATCH OUT is an ongoing series in which curators present young artistic positions that they find exciting. Selected by Yvonne Scheja.

Beatrice and I met during the first pandemic summer of 2020, while both working for an art project in rural saxony. As part of this, Beatrice designed a multi-part column for the community's official journal, in which she presented works by other artists. During this time, we started an ongoing conversation about her artistic practice, which is strongly research oriented and in which sorting, editing and arranging content are central aspects.

Based on her own diasporic connection to the Eurasian continent, the so-called Orient, Beatrice deals with cultural continuities and ruptures, their political dimensions, effects on individuals and the concept of identity. She uses forensic and archaeological methods or culinary techniques, among other things, to investigate the relationship between fact and fiction. Her own family history repeatedly becomes the central subject of her artistic investigations.

The ongoing project Forensic Excavations Inventory or The Total Deconstruction of an Armenian Family is derived from her family's sparse photographic archive, which covers a period from the 1930s to the 1990s. Over 1000 individual objects, figures and body parts were cut out of these images. They were enlarged and mounted, and photographed again in the style of exhibits, ready for inspection, supplemented by personal notes, memories and stories. There is a nose, a Barbie doll, a pair of eyes, a door... By removing the artefacts from their originally private context, the elements become testimonies to a history of forceful migration, violence, socialism, everyday culture, and tradition. Since 2017 Beatrice has staged the artefacts in private environments or public contexts, often combining them with other historic materials documenting the economic relations and arms trade between the German and Ottoman empires and the Armenian genocide. The performative handling of the pieces is also documented and thus becomes photographic material for further investigations and stagings.

About Jasmin Meinold

Jasmin is a cultural practitioner working in curating, publishing and art education. She has worked for the Heidelberger Kunstverein, the Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven and the Kunstverein Ludwigshafen and is currently part of the curatorial department of the Fridericianum. In addition, as a member of the Fine Arts Institute Leipzig - FAIL, she explores socially engaged art practices in non-traditional art spaces such as the village, the prison or the shopping center and carries out projects for and with different audiences.