All of your Stars are but Dust on my Shoes

In a digital mosaic of video clips from the internet and shot on his mobile phone, the Lebanese artist Haig Aivazian (‘Prometheus’, 2019) places images and ideas on a speculative timeline, which stretches from the 19th to the 21st century. From the mythological heyday of whalers, as immortalised in ‘Moby Dick’, to our times with smart cities, surveillance and urban guerilla warfare – a world that reminds us more and more of science fiction. Aivazian is a brilliant sculptor of images with an eye for associative and suggestive connections. He is also an analyst who with a single edit can chart deep causal links between the world and data. Even when the territory is Syria, and the map looks like a starry sky, but is in fact a heartbreaking image of how darkness has fallen over the country in just a few years.