BIOGRAPHY

Yervant Gianikian was born in Merano into a family of Armenian origin whose members survived the 1915 genocide.

He studied architecture in Venice.

Angela Ricci Lucchi was born in Lugo di Romagna.

She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, where she studied painting under Oskar Kokoschka.

They met in Venice.

A personal and artistic partnership began, lasting for more than forty years.

They created their first avant-garde short films in 8mm and 16mm (Cesare Lombroso, Breathing Exercises).

They presented Karagöz, the first of their celebrated “Perfumed Films.” Screenings were accompanied by olfactory essences, disrupting the purely visual experience of the audience.

They conceived and handcrafted the Analytical Camera, a device that enabled them to rephotograph archival film frame by frame, alter its speed, enlarge details, and apply colour-toning effects.

From Pole to Equator was released, an absolute masterpiece of found-footage cinema. By reworking the archive of pioneering filmmaker Luca Comerio, the couple exposed the violence of the colonial gaze.

Prisoners of War was released as the first chapter of their monumental War Trilogy, focusing on archival materials from the First World War and the suffering of soldiers and civilians.

On All Peaks Is Peace was released as the second chapter of the trilogy, focusing on the high-altitude conflict in the Dolomites and the militarisation of nature.

Wedding March explored the manipulation of the body and the roots of gender-based violence and patriarchal subjugation through archival wedding footage.

The duo concluded the trilogy with Oh! Man, presented at the Cannes Film Festival. The film examined the mutilated bodies of war veterans, prosthetics, and the violated childhood of the immediate postwar period.

The MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York dedicated a complete retrospective to the couple.

They presented the monumental installation Non Non Non at HangarBicocca in Milan, focusing on the memory of childhood traumas in the twentieth century.

They participated in the 56th Venice Biennale of Art as part of the Armenia Pavilion, which was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation.

Angela Ricci Lucchi died in Milan at the age of 76.

A few months after Angela’s death, Yervant Gianikian presented Angela’s Diaries – Two Filmmakers at the Venice Film Festival, a moving archival tribute based on the private notebooks Angela wrote and illustrated during their travels.

The second chapter, Angela’s Diaries. Second Chapter, was subsequently released, continuing the process of working through grief and preserving their shared artistic memory.

Gianikian presented In Front Of Guernica in Venice, a work commissioned by the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid that reinterpreted wartime destruction and Picasso’s masterpiece through their archival materials.

The exhibition Studio Yervant Gianikian was presented, including a screening of In Front Of Guernica (2023). The exhibition recognised their enduring contribution to expanded cinema and the artistic avant-garde.