• 
• Curator: Susanna Gyulamiryan
  Coordinator: FemLibrary Armenia

  Exhibition I
  Gender Corpora | Human Doors
  Raffie Davtian (Iran – Armenia)

  Modern Art Museum, Yerevan

Raffi Davtian’s artistic project entitled “Human Doors” consists of multi-imaged photo-
figures-human bodies installed in the space. The artist has expressed the space of
bodily figurativeness as an alternative “public sphere” in which through artistic
expression not only does the gender discourse get revived but also the discourse of sex
exclusions and the system of oppression are actualized. The installation turns into a
model of “majority” figures who appear in their subjectivity and are caught by “gender
trouble.” Pictured in a “troubled” dynamic each figure appears as the carrier of a
concrete character that can be linked to the “diverse,” “different,” “other” and “queer”
subjectivity. The bodies become a pure signifier of a cultural and social field.
Raffie places the figures in a random, accidental order as though through them the artist
strives to express some kind of “anarchical” space of absolute freedom. The characters
in the installments engaged in a runaway from the “center” of oppression and
subordination. On the other hand, the project makes one believe that the “center” of
oppression hangs heavily upon every single body. Each character in the project with
one of the many different identities carries on itself the weight of the heterosexual power law referred to as phallocentrism. Each photo figure presses a strange for the
(local)spectator object against its genitals. It is a mechanical metallic door “cubeh” (a
Persian word denoting the object with which one knocks on the door). In the past, these
“cubehs” were used to knock on the doors and to recognize the gender of the visitor.
The “cubehs” had either the form of a penis or vagina. They were installed on the gates
and doors of private and public buildings in Iran. One can still see them in the country
although today they have lost their original purpose of giving away new technology, but
they have not been removed in public spaces of Iran in which the “cubeh” carries the
meaning of preservation of conservative culture, gender-biased rituals and customs.
The gendered “cubehs” became widely used in the country with the spread of Islam.
They produce different sounds at knocking. The male sound is low and deep whereas
the female sound is high and loud. The hosting house recognized the gender of the
visitor from the sound the cubehs made. If the visitor was a woman, she was to be
greeted by a female at the door, and vice-versa. On the other hand, if the receiving
party was informed about the arrival of a man, the women of the home had to cover
themselves up from head to feet…

The epistemological effect of using the abovementioned “cubehs” as an instrument for
understanding sex has some order in the project. The biological sex is subordinated to
the social and cultural order. The sexual differentiation is a result of and is manifestly
connected to the social and is subjected to a higher power – the “law of
heterosexuality.” Under this “law,” as Judith Butler has argued, subjectivity is
performative and theatrically performs the powerful social norms of this law. The
physical does not circumscribe the body, the edges of a physical body open the door
towards the social.

By using Persian “cubehs”, the artist certainly does not try to “localize” the problem in
the project. The issue of body, gender, and subjectivity is portrayed as transnational and
universal. However, the sense of urgency would not have been so heightened if not for
the artist’s biography and the context of Iran – the country of his birth and living.
The installation’s space becomes a frame in which “gender trouble” strives to disturb the
established world order and the rigid lines of hierarchy. The project is about struggling
against the oppression center and invites us to reflect on de-centering the discourse of
patriarchal power.

Armenian text here.