Levon Kafaian
Portal Fire: Shrine of the Torchbearer
November 22, 2024 – February 23, 2025
Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead
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Image credit: Levon Kafafian, Detail of Torchbearer Cleric costume, 2024. Courtesy of artist.
Portal Fire: Shrine of the Torchbearer presents new work by the Detroit-based artist Levon Kafafian. Based on a forthcoming graphic novel of the same name, Kafafian combines their textile-based practice with the speculative worldbuilding of science fiction to take visitors on a journey over one thousand years into the future: to a place and time where digital technology has ceased to exist. Through a series of immersive vignettes, we enter the magical, imaginary world of Azadistan, a sophisticated and highly stratified civilization where textiles have become symbolic markers of class and power and act as a narrative guide to the nuances of society.
Positioned as a dialogue with their ancestral roots, Kafafian’s vision of Azadistan shares a distant yet recognizable relationship with the history and culture of a region known as the Armenian Highlands. Through the installation and display of Kafafian’s intricately crafted soft sculptures, wall hangings, carpets, and costumes, Portal Fire: Shrine of the Torchbearer depicts a cavernous Shrine reminiscent of those found under the ancient city of Ani (880s – 1025 AC). A place of deep spiritual significance, the Shrine is tightly guarded by the ‘torchbearers,’ members of the ruling class, as it holds the lost knowledge of the digital past and the key to the liberation of Azadistan’s people. In Kafafian’s words, Portal Fire is a story that “asserts a future beyond survival for Armenian and other Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) cultures into the messy, queer realm of self-determination after liberation.”
Portal Fire: Shrine of the Torchbearer demonstrates Kafafian’s creative approach to channeling the evolving realities of the Armenian diasporic experience. Inspired by the concept of ‘Armeno-Futurism,’ the exhibition centers a commitment to envisioning expansive futures in the wake of the historical and ongoing loss of ancestral Armenian homelands. Kafafian explores the interconnected role of speculative thinking and visionary storytelling as a way of asserting individual and collective agency and offers new narratives for embracing a cultural identity beyond existing systems of power and dominion.
About the Artist
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Image credit: Levon Kafafian. Photo by Tess Mayer.
Based in Detroit, MI, Kafafian holds a BFA in Fiber from the College for Creative Studies and a BA in Anthropology from Wayne State University in 2014. Kafafian has forthcoming exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, MI, and CUE Foundation, NY. They co-led a 7-week public educational weaving program in partnership with Trapholt Museum for Moderne Kunst, Denmark, in 2022, and regularly lecture and teach workshops across the U.S. Kafafian has notably exhibited their work at the University of Michigan, Stamps Gallery, MI, and the Arab American National Museum, MI. They are the recipient of numerous grants, including the Alex and Marie Manoogian Museum Grant (2021), the Creative Armenia Spark Grant (2021), the Red Bull Arts Microgrant (2020), 1the Rauschenberg Foundation SEED Grant (2016), and the Knight Art Challenge Award (2016). They have participated in the International Studio and Curatorial Program Residency (2023) and the Arab American National Museum Residency (2019).
Events
Event information about upcoming exhibitions will be published in fall 2024.
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