YEREVAN/BERLIN — Alicja Khatchikian (born in Italy, 1988) is a Berlin-based artist whose work unfolds at the intersection of documentary, fine art and ethnographic approaches. Through images, text, collage and archival materials, she questions borders, memory and the body as a site of lived experience, often moving outward from her biography. She holds a BA in political science from the University of Trieste and an MA in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Vienna. She later completed her photography studies in Germany. Alongside her artistic practice, she works as a freelance photographer and facilitates image-based workshops focused on artists’ books and collaborative learning.
More about the artist can be found at her website: https://alicjakhatchikian.com/
Dear Alicja, I was very glad to see your images in “What does contemporary Armenia look like?” photo exhibition last April in Yerevan. Why did you choose photography as a means of self-expression?
I think dance and music were my first choice. I started practicing ballet at a very young age, then moved on to modern and contemporary dance. Growing up in the 1990s, cameras were somehow always there: I started using my mom’s camcorder, disposable and other inherited, analog cameras, often with expired films. I wasn’t interested in the results as much as in the process; as a relatively shy person, cameras helped me hold space without being in the spotlight. Only years later, while doing fieldwork for my master’s thesis, I documented the work of performance artists and began shaping my own practice.
What themes attract you the most: people, urban spaces, memory, body, identity, travel?
I’m drawn to stories, and to how context, time and lived experience shape the meaning we make of them. I’m also committed to slow photography as a way of looking and producing. Environments can be as much actual spaces as imaginary landscapes; for instance, Armenian diaspora stories often refer to places we, the grandchildren generation, haven’t seen but only heard of. I think it’s important to listen to those echoes without being anachronistic.
