Pythagoras Lodge (detail) | Karen Nikgol (2009)

Karen Nikgol is an artist, choreographer and curator born in Teheran in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War. The effects of war, memory and masculinity has effected his work strongly. Karen Nikgol tries to analyze the mind, memory and identity through his background, but without taking any cultural point of view, only in aesthetical, philosophical and abstract terms. He is currently working on a spy opera about the inner world of a mute midget, called ”The Silent Song of the Sphinx”. It will be staged at Black Box Theater in Oslo in early October 2012. Other projects include a solo show of paintings at Leyla Heller Gallery in New York and curating at the contemporary art space in Oslo, NoPlace.

How much is really left of an experience once one has experienced it? It is reduced to a thought, a smell, a feeling that can be awakened by anything related to that exact memory. It is still there, living and breathing inside, only transformed into something quite different, individual. But the memory must be expressed in order to stay alive, and in order to stay in tune with the nature of fluxus, that which always is in motion.