Haig Aivazian, Go to Sleep, but Sleep Doesn’t Come to Me
By Anna Maydanik
Still from Haig Aivazian’s قد تملكون القناديل، لكن الضوء لنا / You May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light_الحلقة الاولى / ِEpisode 1, 2023, video, 11:03
Haig Aivazian is a Lebanese artist based in Beirut. His last video project was All Your Stars Are But Dust on my Shoes, 2021 that explored the origin of artificial light from whale-oil lamps, to his own relationship with its current surveillance form. This journey through riots, city blackouts and a post-Internet panopticon into rock bottom, begins a wise narrative about how we see each other. Aivazian presents his newest video project, ا / You May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light_الحلقة الاولى / ِEpisode 1, in a show at Brief Histories called I Go to Sleep, but Sleep Doesn’t Come to Me, where a warm, elevated head space, called Rāwī because he likes to tell stories, adapts the origin story of nervous boredom into a fleeting, extinguish; night is now oppression; purposeful city blackouts; opportunities for civilian control. At this moment of writing, and through the long trajectory of its reading, we have hit rock bottom, enduring the genocide and abandon of carpet bombing in Gaza. Where words fail, music speaks.
A warm, low wail inspires Go to Sleep, but Sleep Doesn’t Come to Me, an Iraqi mawwal. Techno music by Lebanese artist, Noise Diva, accompanies Aivazian’s surreal images of escape. On an animated, dark night in Beirut, the city resists sleep despite an inspiring blackout. A young girl, Khayal drifts through a Milky Way of subconscious terrors, weapons and possessed animals that intoxicate her intuitions about the political drowsiness outside. Aivazian cuts and splices samples of animation that make clear, the only valid perspective is the equating, modern eye of surveillance. Aivazian’s shapeshifting characters remain a singular subject of the state, regardless of idiosyncrasies. Aivazian collapses the history of surveillance into a timeless anxiety around shadows, ghosts and inherited subjugation. Suddenly our sweet Rāwī says, Don’t mix everything up. Because, if you are not careful, you will allow the creatures of the dream world to trespass into reality, and disappears into his shiny, white spotlight, slipping over the city until it’s snared a runaway. Khayal’s parents wile away the spare sunset hours in a speakeasy, drinking alcohol, and erasing the scattered, shattering surprises of the day, numbing the memorable into a banal, manageable irreverence. She is in a dizzying dialogue with the spirits that roam the night. While they can barely hear each other, says Rāwī. Aivazian presents two reactions to a city blackout: the inexperienced child’s dreams of resistance in the cozy confines of her bedroom; the adult’s deaf, high-spirited oblivion that defies curfew. Aivazian’s Beirut streets and pedestrians may be identical to those of 1989, but surveillance has armed these subjects as threats.
As Noise Diva’s soundtrack tunes Aivazian’s audience, ا / You May Own the Lanterns but We Have the Light_الحلقة الاولى / ِEpisode 1, inspires sedentary peace; deep, unbothered sleep; an indulged depression. What is the alternative to the catharsis of violence? Aivazian’s bedtime story is a backdrop against red lights and warm dancing. Music loosens the government monopoly on light and violence. The room closes in like a shutter on a secret: the answer to Aivazian’s question, How can I sleep when I am in this state? My heart is wrapped around a dagger. Don’t sleep. Gather. Dance. Without phones, off the streets.
A story where nothing much happens, but a story about a night filled with mystery and action. In the ritual of everyday, Haig Aivazian wishes us sweet dreams.