Portfolio: Beatrice Schuett Moumdjian visual artist and artistic researcher

Beatrice Schuett Moumdjian (*08/1986) is a visual artist and artistic researcher working media-reflexively in the field between moving and still images, layering analog and digital methodologies in media such as analog film, photography, installation, public art and audio art. She comes from the Ottoman-Armenian community in Sofia and emigrated from (then) the People’s Republic of Bulgaria to Berlin in 1990. Studies 2013-20 at the art academies in The Hague (NL), Weimar and Leipzig, graduated expanded cinema/media art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig. Since 2022 she is a Meisterschülerin (post-grad studies for artists) in photography at the same Academy.

In her multi-disciplinary practice, she explores facts, situations, natures, cultural habits, traditions and customs, historical events and their fields of tension. In doing so, she gets to the bottom of political-historical contexts, brings out individual elements from them, decouples the workings of one concept and applies them to another concept in a different area, and writes a new story with these interwoven components.

She is often inspired by her own autobiography, secrets she has to solve surrounding her identity, and family history between West Asia, the Balkans, and East and West Germany, which has been pushed in different directions by several political powers and acts of violence. In her work, past and present are above all building blocks and signposts for a utopian future, a blank page full of potential.

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Magic City

Photo series, eight motives. Analougue medium format and text, various formats.  Archival prints. 2021

Summary: 

From everyday objects and food from various cultures from my household I build urban landscapes. There are representative buildings in my living space that remind, among other things, the sacred buildings in their typical Armenian architecture, which are built for thousands of years in the same way. The oldest preserved churches and cathedrals today are located, for example, on the territory of Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, with political-religious forces deliberately destroying them.  Since I learned a lot about this, and thus got to know my own West Asian origins better, I have connected these objects with other influences. 

The novel “The Magic City” was published in 1910 by English author Edith Nesbit, whose books I read constantly in my childhood. In the story, children build imaginative buildings in their crowded Victorian household with vases and plates, shrink by magic, and have adventures in their homemade city. Edith Nesbit invented building with household objects to encourage children to playfully appropriate architecture and their built environment, and additionally published a book for adults with instructions and suggestions, At the intersection of art education, play, and architecture, she is unknown in the relevant literature. 

My Magic City, a kind of self-portrait, is composed of the different ethnic communities that are part of my origin or environment, and links my biography with world history.

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Forensic Excavations Inventory or The Total Deconstruction of an Armenian Family

Photo installation. Currently 70 Canson semiglossy archival prints, 22 x 33 cm
200 handcut objects from synthetic materials mounted with Hahnemühle RAG archival print, different sizes – work in progress. Custom-built shelf, plywood. 
Installation view: To Touch at the Edge, KO-OP Art Space. Sofia, BG,  2022 

Summary:

Media-reflective work that uses analog and digital methods to process and analyze the ripple effect of historic political events and their autobiographical consequences. 

I have an Armenian mother and a Bulgarian father, whom I’ve never met, and emigrated in 1990, as a toddler, together with my mother from Sofia to Berlin. For this project I have taken apart what was left of my family photo archive, which dates back to the 1930s and connects West Asia, the Balkans, Eastern Germany and the reunified Berlin of the 1990s. Then I turned the individual details of these typical family polaroids – kind eyes, internet modem, child’s toy, body part – into three-dimensional photo objects. From hundreds of such objects in this newly formed photo archive of the everyday, I selected a handful to use as a jumping-off point to dive deep into my own memories and research. I have written in a terse way that has been sometimes reflected back to me as humorous, and tried to construct the portrait of an Armenian family who are survivors and their descendants of the horrific and genocide in the Ottoman Empire, who fled to Bulgaria. We read about some of their everyday joys and tragedies. Some of them have carried the experienced violence, sufferings and losses into the next generation, and the next. The once-whole family picture expands literally and figuratively and opens an in-between level, a void, in which I can express some of the ambivalence and inexpressible.

The representative function of the photo as a family picture, snapshot or document gives way to an immediacy of the individual element. The ‘total deconstruction’ of the photos gives me the tools of a methodology that allows for a decentralized storytelling with which I can examine the structure and (political) foundation of my personal history.

I tried to implicitly show how the aftermath of this trauma, as well as the socialist reality of Bulgaria and the GDR, have affected me personally, and how the social and political reality of being an “Ausländer” in a new Germany (that poured its confusion into hate crimes and racist attacks on members of the migrant population) has shaped my self-image. The project’s inherent media-reflective methodology and appropriation of museological methods contribute to my questions about the belonging of archives, adherence to historical standards and subjectivity of museology. The smallness of my original photo archives, who have expanded through my method, and the smallness of the photographic evidence of this partially contested genocide are reflected in each other. 

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Documentation Report (No. 0617 – 0918) / German title: Sachstandsdokumentation (Nr. 0617 – 0918) from Beatrice Schuett Moumdjian on Vimeo.

Documentation Report 

Cameraperformance and analogue photo series since 2012. 

Film still from Documentation Report No. 0617: 16mm film scanned in 2K, color, no sound, since 2017 

Summary:

Documentation Report is a continuous series of numbered film and photo sequences. The protagonist is a woman, whose head resembles a surveillance camera. She is observed as she walks through nearly empty streets in formerly communist cities and exchanges looks with surveillance cameras located in the vicinity of important public buildings, for example the federal intelligence agency in Berlin or the National Cultural Palace in Sofia. 

I have personal connections to all places where we have filmed. For instance, I was born before the fall of the Berlin wall in Sofia during the socialist regime, and have now many years later filmed/observed in the same street, where I once have lived.  Like many people during socialism my family has been affected by state surveillance, secrecy and oppression.

In the project I am among others concerned with the relationship between moving image and photography, the interaction of materiality in analogue and digital film, the line between performance, documentary and fiction, surveillance in urban space, being a female in public space, disability and prosthetics, globalism, desire, architecture, bodies and technology. In the editing process above all I want to explore a spatial kind of editing that allows the protagonist to seamlessly transition from one place in the world to another. She is a lost soul moving across time and space in an endless hindsight reel, letting herself be recorded and observed by an unknown entity as she records and observes, herself an unknown entity, that despite her constant image, cannot be known as more than her moving body.