‘I want a middle ground, where reality and fantasy, these two sides of the same thing, would interact, interweave, and leave the viewer in constant question – is this life, or is this fantasy? Not to blindfold the viewer, but to offer something from the literature side of photography, something that swells beneath the visual surface like a sack of sentences.’*

A published writer, Anna Davtyan has also been practicing photography since the late 2000s. While her work uses the aesthetic of snapshots, the artist is not interested in recording events. Instead, she searches for the liminal territory where reality loses its concreteness and turns into poetry. To this end, she works in series, often building them up over a number of years. These carefully constructed visual sequences become narratives about immaterial things like emotion, movement, colour and space.

In The Book of the Fox, Davtyan stages various situations which are shot in a ‘cheap’ way, deliberately making them look prosaic. But the actions performed by her amateur models emulate absurdist theatre, thus interrupting the logic of everyday routines, traditions and domestic spaces. Everything here becomes subordinate to this unfeigned playacting of female desire and imagination.

*Anna Davtyan, Artist’s statement, 2013

Vigen Galstyan