Hany Armanious: Resemblance, Dissemblance, and the Ineffable Silence
The dissemblant image can be understood as one deliberately distant from its subject, seemingly illogical in its association.
In July 2025, I interviewed Hany Armanious in his Sydney apartment. Midway through our conversation, Armanious suddenly decided to cook pasta. Unsure how to respond to this act of hospitality, my mind drifted back to the beginning of our discussion and to a glass-like piece I had seen on the floor with a small pile of thin linguine placed on it. I had asked Armanious if the installation was resin; he replied that the transparent sheet was made of resin, but the pasta was not yet a replica. At this point it was essentially a raw assemblage moment, a simple proposition of a possibility. While eating and trying to sound coherent, I looked down at my plate and noticed it contained the same type of pasta strands as those on the floor, only mine were cooked. I decided not to ask for confirmation of my observation but entertained in my mind that this was a unique way of experiencing the artwork. With pasta in my mouth and the pasta-as-artwork on the floor, a mood to doubt what constitutes an artwork is set in. Our conversation twirled philosophically like the pasta on a fork, around the need for a meaning—or not—for an artwork: the incommensurability of terms like isomorphism, mimesis or replica became central to what we spoke about.
