Born in the Southern region of Armenia, near the city of Goris, Svetlana Antonyan’s interest in photography began as a hobby and she has never had professional schooling in the medium. However, since 2009, her evocative photo-performative works began to be noticed by curators and art critics. This has led to her participation in group exhibitions, like the 2010 ‘Body: the new representational art in Armenia’ and ‘Trouble in paradise: photography and constructions of femininity’ (2014).

The artist’s own body, its relationship to the camera and the world, is the primary subject of Antonyan’s photographs. Her first forays into performative photography expressively transformed the body into a raw nerve. Freed from cultural earmarks and temporal signposts, these photographs distilled the physicallity of the artist into ‘studies of desire and fear’.

Even while Antonyan’s work has increasingly acquired a conceptual ‘bodice’, her photographs retain their rawness. What makes her latest series so engaging is the wider and richer network of references which she brings into play. These encompass a wide range of subjects – from classical painting to news media and politics.

In 2013 Antonyan emigrated to France, where she has continued to explore the semantics of the human body as well as the metaphorical possibilities of the natural landscape.

Vigen Galstyan, 2016