From Ararat to Angeltown
By Violet Grigorian; Marine Petrossian; Vahan Ishkhanyan; Gohar Nikoghosyan; Vahram Martirosyan; Karen Karslyan
London: 2005. Edition of 250.

7.25 x 24.25" Typeface is Nour Patria.

Emily Artinian: “This bilingual English/Armenian book contains newly translated works by six contemporary Armenian authors, all members of the avant garde literary group Bnagir, based in Yerevan, Armenia.

“Also included, as a parallel text, are excerpts from transcripts of [my] discussions with the group during [my] 2004 artist’s residency in Armenia. This text highlights the difficulties of publication facing progressive writers in this ex-Soviet republic, difficulties that are a result of limited cultural acceptance at home, limited economic resources, and also a lack of connections to publication and distribution organizations in the west.

“The book is large format (A1 when open), and photographs of the writers are printed close to life size, bringing the reader into an almost palpable contact with the authors. This is a structural metaphor for the book's power to bridge physical, linguistic and cultural divides.”

The contributors and texts included are:

Love by Violet Grigorian
Yerevan is a Big City by Mariné Petrossian
Brotherhood by Vahan Ishkhanyan
Of Cats and Dogs by Gohar Nikoghosyan
Landslide by Vahram Martirosyan (the first two chapters of the novel)
Love at Every Sight by Karen Karslyan

Translations from the Armenian are by Margarit Tadevosyan-Ordukhanyan.
$130 in brown card envelope
$200 in black cloth letterfold case

The High Window
By Emily Artinian
London: 2005. Edition of 100.

5 x 5.5" pamphlet size. Digital video (15 minutes) on DVD and 26 pamphlets, boxed together. Housed in 6 x 5.25 x 2.25" white box with fold held with black elastic wrap.

Emily Artinian: "For 'The High Window' [I] filmed a New York street scene and wrote a short fictional vignette based on the footage. Twenty-five readers were given the text and asked to describe their imaginative constructions of the scene without viewing the film

"The film component of 'The High Window' presents the original footage, and, in a transparent layer superimposed on this, a selection of the readers' comments. The accompanying collection of pamphlets presents full text transcripts of the interviews.

"Together the book object and film explore correspondences and discontinuities amongst diverse readings of the same fictional text and the ways readers fill in information and create meaning in the gap between themselves and an author.

"The pamphlets and film reference each other through a running film timecode that is noted in the texts to indicate points at which each particular reader appears onscreen, emphasizing the interplay of different media: where the film presents selected segments of interviews in a sensual richness, the pamphlets present them at full length, but through the abstraction of printed text."
$100

real fiction^{(1) (2)} :
documents of a journey ⁽³⁾ to ⁽⁴⁾ the imagined world of José Saramago⁽⁵⁾

By Emily Artinian
London: 2004. Edition of 100.

6.25 x 8.75"; 20 pages. Tri-fold structure. In cream paper wraps. Offset lithography. Digital printing.

Emily Artinian: "Based on the stories of Portuguese writer José Saramago, real fiction is a record of the artist's search for traces of the 'real' in the author's fictional universe.

"The images are of places and people in Lisbon, taken over a three day period, that Emily believes Saramago may have been fictionalizing, or at least had in mind whilst writing.

"The notes in the back section of the book describe the process of the search and make up a document of one reader's 'real' travels into a 'fictional' space.

"The book makes frequent use of the mechanism of the footnote, linking the images in section 1 with the notes in section 2, thus highlighting the contingent nature of both 'factual' and 'fictional' knowledge.

"Finally, the book is an exploration of the reception of Saramago in translation in the English-speaking world, querying the accuracy of the reality we construct as foreign readers of a narrative."
$80

Darkroom
By Emily Artinian
London: 2000. Open Edition.

11 x 6cm. Transparencies bound with brushed nickel posts.

Flipbook animating a dilating pupil.

Emily Artinian: "The idea for a gradual (and manipulatable) transition developed in response to Plato's allegory of the cave, with its emphasis on two discrete states of sight/knowledge."
$100