Antoinette Ohannessian’s work is based on language; the trivial language of everyday situations, whose poetry we fail to grasp. Through a deconstruction of the process of the work, she takes short sentences, out of their context, or written in a particular manner, to highlight this poetry. It is a poetry of words, but also a poetry of simple forms.Her videos are a transcription of this system into images. Watching becomes writing. Antoinette Ohannessian watches with words, with names. She names things, she translates them.
Descriptive writing operates like a recording process, where to say equals to show. Through the naming process, she can make visible a rugby game, a TV news programme… “My videos force writing to stand upright.”
