about Caroline Partamian

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Caroline Partamian is a sound and visual artist, and curator influenced by her training in dance. She works closely with the concept of abreaction – the extraction of dormant memory stored within a muscle, resurfaced through physical movement, of which an individual was previously unaware; these memories span the spectrum and can take many forms – traumatic, erotic, comforting, etc. By focusing on the process rather than anticipated result, her work encourages what can be revealed when one becomes conscious of their kinetic movement in the process of creation.

Partamian has held residencies at Marfa Open, Newburgh AIV, Endless Editions, art quarter budapest, Flux Factory, A.I.R. Krems. and BoxoPROJECTS. She has participated in exhibitions and showings at Compound Yucca Valley, Heavy Manners, Wassaic Project, Babycastles, Otion Front, Anthology Film Archives, and more. Her projects are included in the collections at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Whitney Museum’s Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, and Oxford University’s Bodleian Social Science Library. She was a member of the collaborative psych-punk project Scully, amongst other projects The Splinters, Habibi, and The Numerators. She also runs a small publishing press, Weird Babes, in the form of zines and prints featuring artists' and her own works-in-progress and experiments. She is also the co-founder of the Armenian Creatives group who celebrate the multiplicity of diasporic histories and modes of navigating identities via gatherings and publications.

She received her Master of Arts from New York University’s Museum Studies program, where she focused on applying teaching methods of postmodern dance to the conservation of contemporary performance art acquisitions at museums. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in Anthropology and minors in Music and English. She has worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and artist Laurie Anderson. In recent years, she spent her time in New York City working for various artists including Eva Dean and Amanda Browder, and was an archivist for NYU Fales Library, the Kathleen Hanna documentary The Punk Singer and Death by Audio documentary Goodnight Brooklyn. She has also interned for Film & Video Curator Chrissie Iles and Senior Registrar Barbi Spieler at the Whitney Museum of American Art.