All That Is Seen and Unseen

Your Skin Shall Bear Witness Against You (or Biting the Skin Around My Nails)
2018
Short Story and a Lectern

Biting the Skin Around My Nails Installation View

Your Skin Shall Bear Witness Against You
Installation View

[Your Skin Shall Bear Witness Against You] is a sculptural work consisting of a book lectern, a digital reader, and a short story. It takes a central role in Avakian’s exhibition All That is Seen and Unseen, not only because it is physically placed in the middle of a temple-like scenography, but it also holds the fiction that grounds Avakian’s world: A world of skin, silver, salts, and stains. [The story] narrates the fiction which structures all the other works in the exhibition around itself, and this way represents all the other stories one might know, or might not yet know. […] The work takes a central position by representing the unknown knowledge, its abstractions, corruptions, and its transformation into myths. The fiction in Biting the Skin Around My Nails is supported by other narratives inscribed in the works of the same exhibition: The Book of Books (paper, leather, water, and book debris), Memorandum (sound files on solid-state disk), Your Skin Shall Bear Witness Against You (video), and All That is Seen and Unseen (silver, salts, and light on fine art paper).
— Merve Bedir, Incognitm Pulvis
Biting the Skin Around My Nails Installation close up

Your Skin Shall Bear Witness Against You
Installation close up

Biting the Skin Around My Nails Detail

Your Skin Shall Bear Witness Against You
Detail

Biting the Skin Around My Nails Close up

Your Skin Shall Bear Witness Against You
Close up