school workshop
Who Am I As Karapet?
Workshop by the artists Gagik Arshák & Anne Glassner
with the students of the 2B of BAFEP Sacré Coeur Pressbaum and their art teacher Elisabeth Schafzahl, 19/06/2024, 24/06/2024, 26/07/2024
Final public presentation: Thursday, 26/06/2020, 12 pm
Venue: philomena+, Heinestraße 40, 1020 Vienna
This project took place in the context of the exhibition Traumspeisekammer (06/06 – 27/07/2024)
Hand puppets produced within the workshop, 2024 © philomena+
Based on the exploration of their own family history and the heritage of two cultures, visual artist and performer Anne Glassner and puppeteer Gagik Arshák developed the exhibition Traumspeisekammer, which is on display at the philomena+ art space from June 6 to July 27. The project “Who am I as Karapet?” was realized in collaboration with the pupils of class 2B of the Bafep Sacré Coeur Pressbaum and art teacher Elisabeth Schafzahl. The project enabled the pupils to delve deeper into the topic of the artists’ collaborative work and to design puppet figures, try out performance techniques and develop a puppet show in workshops.
In workshop blocks with Gagik Arshák at the school, students worked on designing their own Karapet figure, an Armenian puppetry character. Each pupil created their own character with characteristic features. These ranged from the sugar fairy, to a rescue worker, the sleeping Lisi, to the homeless Helmut. Anne Glassner worked with the pupils on performative practices and conveyed dreams and sheep as an accessible topic and starting point for the development of a story. Together, they developed the story for a puppet show, which was presented to an audience of kindergarten children and adults in public space in front of the philomena+ exhibition space in Vienna’s 2nd district.
artists
ANNE GLASSNER
(*1984 in Waldviertel) is a visual artist and performer based in Vienna, Austria. Her performances, videos, installations and drawings deal with intensive observations of recurring, everyday acts. The theme of sleep has been a central point of her artisticwork for some time now, which she expresses, amongst other ways, through “sleep performances“, in which she allows others to observe her sleeping in unusual places. In her works she blurs the boundaries between art and life as well as fiction and reality, and she raises questions concerning selfperception and external perception as well as the intersections of the private and the public.
GAGIK ARSHÁK
(*1992 in post-Soviet Armenia) is a theatre and film artist with bases in Washington DC, Yerevan and Vienna. A descendent of architects, artists, and philologues, Gagik Arshák has spent his life distilling both his inherited and learned art into its essential function. Uninterested in form, with a particular distaste in the invisible yet powerful line between the audience and the stage, his latest project, founded in Vienna, “The Karapet Theater Tradition” is his particular interpretation of ancient and contemporary theatre. After a long sleep of decades, if not centuries, the ancient Armenian folk figure Karapet has once again found the need to convey messages, common sense, principles; utopist or realistic, avoiding indoctrinations, ideologies, flags, dogmatism, and modern establishment semiotics as it has only to deal with the human being and all its positive potential.
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