All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes

ALL OF YOUR STARS ARE BUT DUST ON MY SHOES tracks the public administration of light and darkness as an essential policing tool. The video moves between cities like New York and Paris, with the artist’s native Beirut setting the central pulse. Creating an associative genealogy that moves from whale oil lamps to gas lanterns to LED bulbs, from blackouts to curfews, the video is comprised of found footage and material from Aivazian’s own phone. Layering, splicing, and confronting disparate kinds of sound and image, the artist generates a sensorial meditation on how the fundamentals of human vision—light hitting the retina—were mechanized into tools that capture our movements, be it in everyday life or on screen. (Haig Aivazian)

Haig Aivazian is an artist living in Beirut. Working across a range of media and modes of address, he delves into the ways in which power embeds, affects, and moves people, objects, animals, landscape, and architecture. Aivazian has explored apparatuses of control and sovereignty at work in sports, museums, the office, and music. He is currently Artistic Co-Director of the Beirut Art Center. His film NOT EVERY DAY IS SPRING was shown in Forum Expanded in 2017.

Production Haig Aivazian. Production company Haig Aivazian (Beirut, Lebanon). Written and directed by Haig Aivazian. Editing Haig Aivazian. Sound Ziad Moukarzel, Lama Sawaya.

Films

2011: Into Thin Air into the Ground (31 min.). 2013: How Great You Are O Son of the Desert! (26 min.). 2015: This Lightness I Have Lost it Forever (35 min.). 2016: Not Every Day Is Spring (46 min., Forum Expanded 2017). 2019: Prometheus (23 min.). 2021: All of Your Stars Are but Dust on My Shoes.