For Portrait of Duration, Melik Ohanian lingers on the observation and representation of the measurement of time, and more particularly within its base unit, the second. In a University laboratory, he conducts a scientific experiment to observe Cesium – the radioactive element used in atomic clocks to define the universal second – during its transition from solid to liquid state.
Portrait of Duration – Cesium Series is a series of black and white photographs, which reveal 60 variations extracted from the above-mentioned experiments. Through this representation of time by matter, each photograph records the appearance of the latter, at a T moment.