Mikayel Ohanjanyan’s “Legami: Ties That Bind”

2026-03-13 - 10:34

From emerging Armenian artists across the globe to Armenian-American talent in the United States, [Art Speak] spotlights the dynamic and diverse Armenian art world and more. Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. “Everything that is grasped by our desire is bound to us by a tie.” -Simone Weil In Legami: Ties that Bind, Mikayel Ohanjanyan proposes sculpture as both condition and goal: a way of crystallizing the human experience in the present tense. Monumental yet minimal, austere yet sensuous, the five marble works on view could find no better temporary home than Carrara’s mudaC, which is dedicated specially to the marble arts. The sculptures do not impose themselves as declarations. Instead, they create a charged space in which to contemplate the forces, visible and invisible, that hold us all together. The Italian word legami evokes bonds, ties, connections. For Ohanjanyan, it is not merely a social term but an ontological one. Humanity is imagined as part of a vast web extending across time, history, and matter itself. The exhibition’s five sculptures, carved from luminous white statuary marble, each consists of two irregular, formless blocks bound tightly together by stainless steel cables. The cables cut into the stone, traversing its surface with palpable tension, and both simultaneously wound and secure. Marble—long synonymous with permanence, monumentality, and an ephemeral wish for permanence—here becomes precarious. What appears solid reveals itself as contingent, held together only through continuous pressure. The binding cables suggest unity, yet they also intimate coercion. The works inhabit a fragile threshold between cohesion and separation, asking whether unity is the result of harmony, or something imposed by another. This tension between control and vulnerability lies at the core of the work presented. Historically, binding has served both protective and punitive purposes. The Japanese martial discipline of hojojutsu, the art of restraining with rope, transforms knots and cords into visible markers of hierarchy, transgression, and psychological force. Ohanjanyan’s cables, while materially different, resonate with similar ambiguity: they secure, but they also expose. They speak of intimacy and constraint, of embrace and captivity. To live is in some measure to transgress and to exist is to be bound—to gravity, to history, to one another. The bonds that tie us to the earth are the same that make us human. The cables become metaphors for attachment itself: to love, to memory, to the irreducible weight of being. Classically educated in Armenia at the Terlemezyan State College of Fine Arts followed by the State Academy of Fine Arts of Yerevan, Ohanjanyan continued his training in Italy at Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, where he has remained for almost 30 years. He is now building his own studio in Carrara, the historic center of marble production, home to the world’s most famous marble quarries. Here Ohanjanyan draws from archaic sculptural traditions and academic discipline and has developed a language that is unmistakably contemporary. His search for form emerges from classical sources—the integrity of mass, the authority of carved stone—but it crystallizes the anxieties and contradictions of our own time. The polished passages of marble resemble so many fragments, remnants of a primordial vibration. They suggest that beneath fracture lies continuity; beneath rupture, a persistent resonance. Opposites structure the work: tension and fragility, permanence and transformation, the physical and the metaphysical. The sculptures are experimental yet deeply informed by history and memory. Their forms appear incomplete, yet the act of binding them together proposes a utopian gesture: an attempt to recover a lost collective coherence. This gesture may be impossible, but it remains essential. Ohanjanyan’s practice has long centered on the human being, explored in both its inner and outer dimensions. Earlier bodies of work investigated introversion, materiality, and the invisible. With Legami, these concerns converge. The works do not resolve contradiction; they hold it in suspension. They ask us to confront the structures—psychological, social, spiritual—that shape identity and the broader human narrative. In the historic marble city of Carrara, where stone has been quarried since Roman antiquity and shaped into ideals of divine and human perfection, Ohanjanyan’s sculptures offer a different proposition. They do not aspire to flawless totality. Instead, they foreground fracture and interdependence. They suggest that wholeness, if it exists at all, is not an original state but a continuous act of binding. To crystallize “the vibration responsible for all creation in our times” is an ambitious undertaking. Yet this is precisely what Legami attempts: to render abstract metaphysics tangible through mass, surface, and tension. In doing so, Ohanjanyan bridges past and present, classical and contemporary, and casts a shadow toward the future. The works stand as meditations on resilience, not as triumphant endurance, but as the quiet persistence of connection. Ultimately, these sculptures remind us that bonds are neither purely chosen nor imposed. They are the condition of existence. In their restrained drama and sensual materiality, Ohanjanyan’s forms offer a poetic meditation on the ties that bind everything together, from the atoms that cause the very electrical vibrations that constitute the universe to our own fragile bodies. Steel and stone, mind and body, the self and other. Like the mythical philosopher’s stone of yore, Ohanjanyan’s work deals in the almost alchemical, holding us in a precarious, necessary embrace. Christopher Atamian Atamian’s work can be read in leading publications including The New York Times Book Review, The Huffington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, the New Criterion and Hyperallergic. He is the former dance critic for The New York Press and Publisher of KGB Magazine. He has also contributed to The Harpy Hybrid Review, AUB’s Rusted Radishes, and the Beirut Daily Star. He also wrote regularly for AIM Magazine, The Armenian Reporter, and Ararat Magazine. Atamian is the co-founder and curator of Atamian Hovsepian Curatorial Project, an international undertaking with gallery spaces in New York City and Yerevan. To date he has authored and translated seven books and translations from Western Armenian and French; and has written and directed films that have screened at the Venice Biennale and film festivals internationally. An alumnus of Harvard University, USC Film School and Columbia Business School, Christopher studied on a Fulbright Scholarship at the ETH Zürich. He has been the recipient of two Tölölyan Literary Prizes, a 2015 Ellis Island Medal of Honor and been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.Instagram: @christopheratamian See all [Art Speak] articles here Comment