“Norayr Kasper is a unique voice, blending a distinct artistic formation and diverse cultural background into a rare and precious vision. Steel-Lives, Still-Life is a summation of his aesthetic and intellectual obsessions.” Atom Egoyan

Kasper is on his way back to the invisible city of his schooling and upbringing. After two decades as a cinematographer in Canada, Venice is the city the artist has chosen to exhibit his first international work: STEEL-LIVES, STILL-LIFE.

After years of travelling throughout Armenia, the cinematographer, photographer and artist Norayr Kasper offers a narrative of the Armenian steel industry from the last century. Steel-lives, still living; the paradox and acuteness in Kasper’s title is telling. “The lucidity of the work is clear,” as the curator Roger Connah writes, “stay outside of history, but avoid being trapped by the limitations imposed from outside.”

“Inspired by the remnants of post-Soviet industrial legacy in Armenia, Steel-Lives, Still-Life”, Norayr Kasper explains, “ is an installation that attempts to give representational and narrative form to loss of relevance of both machine and man. Vast expanses of desolate and abandoned buildings trace the tale of a once vibrant industry. Inside those still surviving factories, are the portraits of workers, in age-old canvas uniforms, still tending to the odd machine in dim light and textured shadows of rust and grease”.

Layered with tonal and emotional significance, Kasper’s series of images haunt history and the space they have come to occupy; the Neo-Palladian ‘Loggia del Temanza’ in the garden of the Palazzo Zenobio. The installation consists of four main silk-printed images held in dialogue with the abandoned steel of the easels. These installations are delicately placed in parenthesis as the ghostly unchanging imagery of the steelworks is projected, accompanied by a silent but insistent soundtrack which brings us face to face with the dreamworld and utopia within these abandoned environments.

As the philosopher and critic Chakè Matossian writes, “Norayr Kasper unveils the spectral dimension of photography, and projects it outside the frame of the work by floating large veils of silk in the space of the exhibition... The flowing fabric contrasts with the rigid metal, the fluttering of the one with the immobility of the other, the poetics of the former with the aggression of the latter. By ironically foregrounding the hardness of the easel, Kasper reminds us that it was originally an instrument of torture, a rack. There is no work of art without torture.”

A corpse can indeed go on dying, as Jorge Semprun wrote, but whilst these industrial giants crumble in slow motion, residues remain. Like the inert cast of animals, vegetables and flowers placed on a wooden table manifest their ultimate virtues in the Still Life paintings of J.S.Chardin, similarly the textured layers of metal evoke both memory and history. This reminds us that the fragile stems of political agendas always make up for knowing with a forgetting. That is why the woman located at the entrance to the ‘Loggia del Temanza’ looks back to a future always held between the loss of relevance at one stage of life and the creative residue of hope slipping into the present.

The photographer and artist Norayr Kasper takes us - literally by using silk - through these delicate images until we encounter the Micro Museum of Lost relevance and Creative Residue. Less concerned with technical exactitude, Kasper confronts the visitor with the architecture of this lost dreamworld. As if to question our own state of mind and the relevance to society today, here a silk book of the images collected is locked within this fragile material. Kasper asks the same question Lenin did in 1901, the same question turned into art protest, agency and resistance: What is to be done? Refusing however to compete with the slogan, Norayr Kasper’s work is the very strength of fragility. Haunted by ghostly spatiality, deeply silent but nevertheless speaking in a loud and clear voice; don’t accept imitations.

Norayr Kasper - artist A Canadian visual artist of Armenian ancestry, growing up in Venice and now living in Toronto, Kasper’s sensibilities stem from a diverse cultural background, resulting in a rich multidisciplinary art formation. He studied photography and architecture in Venice (IUAV Università), graduated in film production and cinema, Montreal (Concordia University, 1990). His work includes art and documentary photography, art films, cinematography of over 30 television and feature films out of which he has shaped a distinct visual signature. His first feature film “Calendar” (in collaboration with director Atom Egoyan), a dialectic between photography and memory, won international recognitions among scholars and critics alike. Over the years he has received many cinematography awards and nominations. Kasper’s expressionistic style emphasizes a rich visual experience where textural elements, lighting, and movement heighten the expressiveness of his varied, cross-disciplinary works.