Anna Boghiguian

Born in 1946, Anna Boghiguian creates immersive installations, but also investigates the intimate self in her practice of writing and drawing. The element of story or narrative is used as the basis her reflections, and she has illustrated major texts by Constantin Cavafy, Rabindranath Tagore and Giuseppe Ungaretti. She travels extensively, breaking down barriers and creating new work wherever she finds herself, but never fails to return to her native city, Cairo.
Her works are invariably compositions of a particularly dense nature, in which she sometimes incorporates her won writing. The narrative elements she introduces, a mixture of the personal and the political, deconstruct the real in order to gain access to the mythological and the universal. In response to an ever-changing world, Anna Boghiguian chooses to use wax, a medium which is both solid and liquid, echoing the brief nature of life as it flows through our bodies… before disappearing into the great cycle of nature.
After exposing her work at the ZKM during Documenta 13, the Sharjah, Venice and Istanbul biennales, the New Museum of Contemporary Art of New York and the Tate St Ives, this year it is the turn of the Festival d’Automne à Paris to an extend an invitation to her. In the grandiose ‘cour vitrée’ or glass-roofed interior courtyard of the Palais des études des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Anna Boghiguian conjures up a vast chessboard reflecting the rich, tumultuous relations between individuals in a world subject to incessant transformations.
Two complete sets are laid out at both ends of the glass-roofed courtyard and bring into opposition, respectively, a group of soldiers with some demonstrators and an assembly of thinkers with male and female politicians whose aim was to put into practice their ideals, but who, more often than not, betrayed them in the process. Thus, we might see an encounter between the poet Tagore and Chávez, dervishes or Queen Victoria. Each of the sixty-four pieces has been painted on paper before mounted on wood and then suspended from the glass roof of the interior courtyard.
Around them, tables and chairs are available for use by chess players of all different levels of expertise, Beaux-Arts students and professionals participating in tournaments organised by the Ligue d’Echecs d’Ile de France chess league.
Two complete sets are laid out at both ends of the glass-roofed courtyard and bring into opposition, respectively, a group of soldiers with some demonstrators and an assembly of thinkers with male and female politicians whose aim was to put into practice their ideals, but who, more often than not, betrayed them in the process. Thus, we might see an encounter between the poet Tagore and Chávez, dervishes or Queen Victoria. Each of the sixty-four pieces has been painted on paper before mounted on wood and then suspended from the glass roof of the interior courtyard. Around them, tables and chairs are available for use by chess players of all different levels of expertise, Beaux-Arts students and professionals participating in tournaments organised by the Ligue d’Echecs d’Ile de France chess league.
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Interruption from Wed. 6 to Wed. 13 November.
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At the Festival’s invitation, Anna Boghiguian has created a limited-edition work available for purchase at the online boutique Here.
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Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue in French (100 pages, with illustrations in colour).
Available only at the Beaux-Arts de Paris' bookshop.