Anna Boghiguian: Period of Change
Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin
★★★★☆
Born in Cairo in 1946, Anna Boghiguian is a contemporary artist enjoying a period of late-in-life celebrity.
In 2012, her show at the Documenta art festival in Germany made a splash, featuring more than 100 drawings that chronicled connections between Nazism and 19th-century colonial imperialism. Selected for the Venice Biennale three years later, she and her fellow pavilion artists examined the subject of the Armenian genocide, evidence of which is denied by the Turkish state to this day.
Boghiguian’s compelling contribution made an impression on the biennale’s judges, who awarded her the prestigious Golden Lion prize for best national participation. If this put her on the map, the announcement that she is the recipient of the 2024 Wolfgang Hahn Prize – one of Europe’s most lucrative art awards, valued at €100,000 – has thoroughly cemented her reputation as a rising star.
Several prize judges stressed that their choice wasn’t influenced by Boghiguian’s age: the nominations weren’t intended to recognise the Egyptian-Armenian artist’s lifetime of achievement; rather, her selection was due simply to the urgency of her work and to its powerful aesthetic.
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Period of Change, now showing at the Douglas Hyde, was originally commissioned by the Austrian gallery Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2022, which explains the strong presence of Austrian political and intellectual figures across the work. The centrepiece of Boghiguian’s exhibition is The Chess Game, also from 2022. The board is 8m by 8m in size, taking up a swathe of the main gallery space downstairs. The game pieces consist of painted figures; the characters appear on vertical cardboard backdrops, similar to Anne Ryan’s recent work at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios.
Boghiguian uses a technique called encaustic, combining paint pigment with hot wax, which has a softening impasto-like effect, yielding a blurred impression. Included among the cadre are notable historical figures such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Ferdinand, Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette and Aribert Heim, the infamous physician of the Mauthausen concentration camp (who fled to Egypt after the second World War). Also downstairs is a room suffused with red, where a spectral voice creates oblique, transient connections between some of the same characters, the history of their periods and their role in 20th-century instability.
According to the artist, the idea to use a floor-size chessboard for her installation arose a few years ago, when she visited the Festival d’Automne in Paris. Walking into a large room with monochrome tiles and sculptures, Boghiguian was struck by the space’s resemblance to a life-size chess grid. In addition to being the perfect setting for the sort of politicohistorical narratives that appear time and again in her work, the idea appealed to Boghiguian’s sense of order, as the black-and-white surface “organises the mind”.
This prompts the question of what it’s organised for. The answer is not readily forthcoming. Boghiguian creates an environment that is politically charged and freighted with historical connotations but refrains from didacticism. Her work encourages the audience to slow down and wait. Marie Antoinette’s recurrence and central placing induced me to reflect on the impact of a single life, especially when that person was living through the twilight stages of an almost obsolete social hierarchy, but I’m sure others had different considerations on their mind. Immersed in the multiple threads of a historical tapestry, patterns are easy to spot but hard to fathom.
Period of Change is at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, until Sunday, September 22nd
