Dur
Mikayel Ohanjanyan
Suspended high up in the loggia of the Honorary Courtyard’s upper colonnade, Dur is the site-specific work Mikayel Ohanjanyan designed for the space hosting his exhibition in Milan.
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Two scultures, measuring approximately 15 m in length
Each element: 120 x 120 x 120 cm
Mixed materials, ropes, 2015
Dur (Door) was specially created for the arcaded loggia in the 17th-century courtyard of Università degli Studi di Milano. It is composed of two cubic structures held in a state of balance by a small cube placed in the middle of the space running between them.
Like Tasnerku + 1, Dur can be traced back to music and, above all, to the rhythm of a musical adaptation of the numerical sequence worked out by Fibonacci in the 12th century. It is, in fact, a sculptural embodiment of a triton, the interval creating one of the main dissonances on the diatonic scale.
Just like Tasnerku + 1, Dur analyses one of the symbolic aspects of music, its dissonant side, represented in many different cultures as a door, a dual and dynamic factor encouraging the opening up of other entrances into an immense space poised between ‘openness’ and ‘closure’.
A passageway beyond matter
Dur’s main element is also cube, a simple form, stable in itself but rendered precarious by the tension in the ropes running through it to create a contrast. In this way a solid form extends into a space of a different consistency, an invitation to move beyond the reality of matter.
The tension created by the two cubes in Dur is a sculptural rendering of the F-B triton in the circle of fifths that the musical anthropologist Marius Schneider once described as the zone of double beings and of contact between fire and water.
