Born in Egypt to an Armenian family, Anna Boghiguian (Cairo, 1946) is a multifaceted artist who first studied at the American University in Cairo, and then travelled the Mediterranean coast, the Aegean Sea and the Atlantic to Montreal and Mexico, followed by the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea… Canadian by adoption, travelling has always been one of her main sources of inspiration. Her poetic work spans paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, installations and narratives. Her love for literature and words, borrowed and twisted, is at the basis of an oeuvre in constant motion, which goes beyond all borders. The following conversation took place in conjunction with Anna Boghiguian’s exhibition A Clown Jumped into the Arena (4 November 2023 to 10 February 2024) at Galleria Franco Noero in Turin.
FV: Your work Conversations with Clarice (2019) was an installation shown at Mendes Wood DM (Brazil, 2019) and Manifesta 13 (Marseille, 2020), where we first worked together. Your show of drawings, paintings and sculptures revolved around Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to GH (1964), and particularly the moment in which GH, the narrator, realizes that there is a cockroach in her wardrobe. I remember that in the novel all her certainties vanished the moment she saw that insect.
AB: All of my work, all of my drawings, come from a vision. In Lispector’s novel, the cockroach is jumping out from an inner dark corner, like something unexpected and traumatic.
FV: Like a playful but frightening apparition. But the cockroach is also one of the most resilient insects in the world, forever climbing, and with no surface able to resist it. In your installation that image is represented by a cockroach freefalling from the sky to the ground… where all your drawings on Lispector were.
AB: All of this comes from a dialogue as well. In 2020, next to this work at Manifesta 13, we were showing the work To the Lighthouse (2019), an abridged, illustrated version of Virginia Woolf’s novel (To the Lighthouse, 1927), with [twenty-three] acrylic-on-metal paintings.
FV: How can we read this dialogue?
AB: It is possible to read this dialogue on different levels. Clarice Lispector has a philosophy of understanding, like in Água Viva (1973), which follows on in all her books. And I thought that it was good idea to place her in a dialogue with Virginia Woolf, because the English writer had a great influence on the writing of Clarice Lispector. Virginia Woolf changed writing completely; she changed the way fiction writing is. And it is very interesting that in her writing, things don’t move. The same with Lispector: things are there, they move but they don’t. They become conversations and situations, but nothing like what the novel had been before that.
FV: Clarice Lispector’s delicacy recalls that of Virginia Woolf in a way… The whole exhibition is this conversation between two women who explored the semantic limits of literature, reshaping fiction writing from within. And then there is your work, in which your drawings enrich the texts and allow them to be read in a new way, beyond language.
AB: In my work the text is united with the painting. Other works came from the writings of poets and figures such as Rabindranath Tagore and Friedrich Nietzsche.
FV: When and how did these images become clear in your mind while reading texts and novels?
AB: It’s a question of habit. I was doing an artist’s book and many illustrations that were published by the French editor Fata Morgana, for example, Poems by Constantine Cavafy (1997); Carnet Egyptien by Giuseppe Ungaretti (2000); and my book Images of the Nile (2000). The books were translations of texts into imagery. So, it became a very habitual thing for me to work with the literary to make it visual.
FV: Do you start sketches with a structure already in mind, or do you work by first drawing little pieces of it and then putting them together in a work?
AB: I start from little pieces, images, and it develops from there. But it depends, you know. The image can be so visually clear that I draw it without any hesitation, I know what to do and so it goes. But sometimes I run out of images in my mind.
FV: And what do you do if you run out of images?
AB: I go to the place where the situation happened. I go to live the situation, not with the imaginary but within the realm of the real. Or I search for an environment that is in a way similar to the situation read in the text. For example, if someone is speaking about the ocean and there are no more images of it in my mind, I physically go to the ocean and watch it. Then I get more images and what to draw becomes clearer to me.
FV: Many of your works are inspired by places and journeys. When you made drawings during your travels during the 1980s and 1990s, you used sketchbooks. Is it still important to you to keep a notebook?
AB: I haven’t made a notebook for a couple of months now. I think I will start doing it again but, you know, sometimes they get lost very easily.
FV: In Canada, I heard a story about things you lost…
AB: Yes, once I went from Canada to the former Yugoslavia and, since there was a strike at the airport in Belgrade where I landed, I went by train from there to Athens. On that trip, I lost all my suitcases. Everything was gone, all my drawings, all the work I was taking to Canada to Cairo. The only reason they didn’t steal my money was because I had it on me.
FV: You’ve been travelling since you were twenty. Would you define your life as nomadic?
AB: I don’t think my life is that nomadic. There are people that travel more than me. I like moving around, but I wouldn’t call myself nomadic. To tell the truth: I lived in Canada for ten years without travelling, except for once to Czechoslovakia, once to Mexico, to New York a few times, and to South Canada. In general, I just go to places because they inspire interest in me. Images come to my mind and then I go there. That happened more when I was younger than it does now. And from those travels I don’t usually make travel books, but I do form images in my mind. On Athens, on Greece, and all the other places I can draw. For example, I became interested in boats and I started to draw them. Now I have a lot of paintings and books on boats. Any kind of boats, except for cruise ships because they are so big.
FV: Do you have these drawings in your archive?
AB: Yes, but it’s very difficult to know what an archive is at the end of the day.
FV: What are you preparing for the A Clown Jumped into the Arena exhibition at Galleria Franco Noero in Turin?
AB: I’m preparing many birds and sculptures, in bronze, glass and textile. It started from some images I had in my mind. And I’m going to put my writing on the walls, and on a dinner table where I wrote some texts. The sculptures will be hanging on the wall or in the centre of the room. They’re made of fabric, and hand painted on canvas.
FV: Which figures do they represent?
AB: One represents Farouk, the old Egyptian king, during the monarchy. There are some Egyptian characters but it’s mainly clowns, characters that bear witness to the situation of the world. How things are dealt with by going round and round in circles, and how things are not dealt with at all.
FV: A complex system seems to keep these figures anchored to their historical and political spot. They’re restricted, limited, unable to move. In contrast to the other animals, such as birds, which are represented here as free. A metaphor on the human condition, also relating to your native land?
AB: The show is about birds and how birds migrate and are very well organized. Because birds are order, they know where they’re going and they have no boundaries. They can travel in the sky and on land. While human beings are more restrained by organization, bureaucracy and themselves. The human being is constrained by land and politics, order and power. In the show, you see bronze sculptures and an alienated land: people cannot do anything anymore. The situation of the world has become a bubble outside the capacity of human control. On the wall I’ll write: the white, the blue and the red. And when the image moves on, from dark to light… The morality of immorality.