HRS Lecture: Anna Boghiguian

Anna Boghiguian, born in Egypt in an Armenian family, studied economics and political science at the American University in Cairo in 1969, where she learned painting from the Egyptian artist Fouad Kamel (1919-1973). When her family emigrated to Montreal, she continued her arts education at Concordia University, where she earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts and music. She lost her hearing at this time. Since then, her ear has been a recurring motif in her work, alternating in a metaphysical, organic, social and sensory sense, as in the installation Guilt Machine (2013) or on the canvas Mapping the Ear (2011-2014). Nomadic artist A. Boghiguian travels the continents and fills mountains of sketchbooks with drawings. Inhabited by the sounds of cities and earthquakes, she develops a hybrid and poetic work combining paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures, installations and stories to create a mental, emotional and physical cartography of the world. Her travels greatly nourish her practice, between a travel diary and a private diary. Her production inspired by literature is interspersed with words taken from personal stories or borrowed from games, newspapers, mythological or historical stories. "There are narrative stories in my work because my principle of thinking is based on the form of a story," says the artist, whose work functions as a book exploding in space. This affinity for literature has led her to produce illustrations for many books, including poems by Constantine Cavafy, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Naguib Mahfouz, the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature. “The lecture will be on my works exhibited in SMAK in Gent, Belgium. About the industrial revolution started in Ghent and moved on over the continent. On cotton production in Congo, On the salt traders the use of sail and how it started, the use of objects and textiles.The necessity of cut outs and the process that took me there. On the use of organic materials such as bee wax and pigments encaustic that I started since 1989 experimenting with although I had previously for decades used wax crayons. It will cover cavafy god abandons Anthony linked with city of names textile factories as well the making of the American economy the slave trade and the British industrial revolution from where it moved to Ghent and to the mainland.”