Being no stranger to post-Soviet 1990s hunger, poverty, and instability in central Russia, Maria Gunko learns about the Armenian experience of the “cold and dark years” at a 2016 exhibit at Yerevan’s History Museum, and is astonished by how little is known about these events outside of Armenian society. In her latest piece, Gunko explores the happiness that comes when the electricity comes.

In her next piece for “Outside In” Maria Gunko recounts her exploration of the Armenian language. Learning it for a foreigner can be tough, she says, but not as tough as it may seem at first glance. Every cloud has a silver lining.

The surroundings of the Kobayr Monastery are a contrast between the eternal and the fleeting, the essence and the image, serenity and mundane chaos. Maria Gunko’s story is a patchwork of two places and one character who seemingly dwells between them, making a life from what’s available.

In commemoration of renowned Armenian poet Yeghishe Charents, Maria Gunko delves into his colorful universe to see how it captures the essence of Armenia's landscapes and geography, drawing parallels with her perceptions.

In trying to understand her assumptions of her position as a researcher, and the spaces she could access, Maria Gunko uncovered that it was not her ethnicity that informed how she was perceived on the field site, but rather the explosive mixture of her gender and ethnicity.

According to traditional gendered divisions of household labor, repairs fall to the man of the house and his ability to perform such work is very much linked to being seen as a “proper” man. But what about the women? Maria Gunko’s fascinating journey into the realm of the “female fix”.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union created vast areas of abandonment and no-go zones that froze in time. In this next essay in the “Outside In” series, Maria Gunko writes that until the material relics of the Soviet Union disappear for good, we are deemed to revisit them, provoking thoughts about what societies value, how they evolve and what they leave behind.

Following the story of Dastakert, Armenia’s smallest city, this next essay in the “Outside In” series looks behind the veil of yet another small Armenian city and offers a glimpse into the lives of its “void dwellers”, namely Siranush.

Once an agricultural settlement, tidily inscribed into the picturesque mountain landscape, Dastakert was remade by the Soviet state into a site of copper-molybdenum extractivism. That project failed. What happened to the city?

The unprecedented influx of Russian citizens due to the Russia-Ukraine war into states that were under Moscow’s rule for centuries, is often locally perceived as endangering the identity and undermining the independence of these states. Maria Gunko explains.

A review of an exhibition in the village of Verishen in Armenia’s Syunik region featuring a contemporary carpet collection by Goris-born artist Davit Kochunts, examines the concept of social space and the process of territorialization.

Fences made from radiators are a powerful symbolic and tangible point of inquiry into the entangled history of Armenia's (de)modernization, which is linked to the dynamics of colonialism and independence, as well as the different state practices in the making.