The Brooklyn Rail

It is late evening in London, and I am attempting to speak to Sonia in New York. She is aged eighty at this point. Her son, Arné, downloads WhatsApp onto her mobile phone and within the space of minutes, I have three missed calls from her. I dial back hurriedly; she is a little out of breath. Sonia informs me that she has just returned from fulfilling an important aspect of her daily routine—walking from her loft, which also houses her studio, in Tribeca, which she has occupied since the 1970s, down to the banks of the Hudson River.

As she describes the rippling effects of the water, I begin to mentally conjure her abstract paintings, which often resemble language, swelling and subsiding into the skin of the canvas. The history of the Hudson River evades our conversation, but the context of the waterway as a political boundary between the states of New Jersey and New York does not escape me. Nor does its colonial history as a location for Dutch settlers, and its presence as a site of contamination—victim to the likes of General Electric (GE)—instigating long-term ecological concern.

Instead, Sonia gleans a metaphor of the shapely water as suggestive of alphabetical forms—the intimation of language is prescient for someone who has lived most of her professional life in a country—the United States—where communication is performed through speech acts that diverge from her mother tongue: Armenian

Persistent and inquisitive, the artist is curious about the movements in my life—querying various forms of identification, so that, one assumes, the storyteller in her, can determine how best to construct her own tale. “I was raised in a very strict household: eight girls and two boys,” she begins, as the pendulum swings back. She was born Sonia Amirian in Arak, Iran, in 1942, to a father of Armenian descent. Her ancestors had moved from what would become the Armenian region near Isfahan in the early seventeenth century, during the Safavid dynasty, forming the city of Jolfa.

Sonia’s father insisted upon a form of studiousness that she felt oppressive, so exit strategies brewed in her mind. She gasps in delight as she recollects laying in a small nook on the balcony of her family’s home at night. Then a teenager, she sought to invent her own world, one which unfolded in poetry—her first point of fixation. Her words, authored in Armenian (the language spoken at home), began with reflections on nature, before turning inwards: “To wring, to tear apart old memories/ To leave home consciously,/ To walk until dawn,/ And with all one’s being.” Her poems, like her paintings, all of which are untitled, authored in interleaving verse, mostly remain untranslated. All are undated. Their origin can only be determined. Her late husband, Edward Balassanian, nonetheless, insisted that two collected anthologies were published. One in 1982 and 1991, respectively. Sonia, who would become a member of “Nor EJ” (New Page), where she was often teased, being the only woman.

At twenty-three years of age, Sonia married Edward Balassanian, who suggested the couple move to Britain for a year to hone their English-language skills before they relocated to the United States, where Sonia had been accepted into the joint art program of the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Sonia graduated in 1970, but it was the following year, when she began the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York, that she became invigorated with an unbridled fervor for testing the formal limits in and around artmaking. Significant artistic figures Frank Stella, Lucas Samaras, and Robert Rauschenberg were mentors on the course at the time, but the thrill for Sonia had more to do with her encounters than with any formal teaching.

The organizers of the program convened impromptu gatherings, and, on several occasions, Sonia suddenly felt the disciplinary boundaries of art begin to blur. She recalls that it was upon seeing ballet dancers perform for them that she reconciled herself with the possibility of using her body as a border, a site of contingency, and a field of vision, in her own artmaking. The New York art scene “just unfolded before my eyes… and that gave me an entirely different way of experiencing and seeing myself.” The words fell out of her mouth with an optimistic glee that both enlivened and perplexed me. Although she has been making art for more than five decades, with budding critical acclaim in the late seventies and early eighties, followed by a swell of activity in the early nineties, Balassanian has nary exhibited in the city in which she continues to live and work today.

For a person with Sonia’s constitution, tension swells and bristles around a specific set of issues. Politics, friendship, ethno-nationalism all played a role in both amplifying her voice, along with several other Iranian women, and equally served as a straight jacket for a period. The artist found kinship among artists who embodied similar lived experiences and who embraced their dualities: Marco Grigorian and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian are but two examples. The entanglements that these individuals possessed—their ability to fashion multiple worlds—parallels Sonia Balassanian’s life and work.

Sonia’s life and art has never dwelled upon nor subscribed to a specific continuum. Despite her work being presented in the nineties as a form of ethno-exoticism in the United States, she then went on to resist this context, teaching herself how to use a Sony Video 8 camcorder to produce strident films that metaphorized the human body into contorted architectures. Meanwhile, she continued to author poetry, to remain politically active—focusing on the issue of women’s emancipation—alongside organizing exhibitions and residencies, and teaching. Her biography offers a passage through which to examine and encounter the sensitivities that emerge in and out of a world that is leaden with the gaze of constant expectation.