For a nation that has experienced multiple instances of genocidal destruction, the protection of historical patrimony should have been an obsessive preoccupation and yet we have the tragic examples of the museums in Shushi and Hadrut.
Only in nurturing the growth of critical thinking can we strengthen the positions of our cultural identity and its continuing relevance in the increasingly chaotic geopolitical and technological tides of the 21st century.
How a tightly rolled bundle of negatives taken by Hamo Kharatyan in the 1930s slowly began to reveal astonishing, quite unfamiliar aspects of Vanadzor's life that were already on the verge of disappearing.
The first Armenian-owned photo studios in Constantinople and Tbilisi at the end of the 1850s not only immortalized people’s lives, they were an effective shortcut to modernity and a powerful symbol of cultural emancipation.
While some of the more mercantile segments of Armenia’s economic, political and media echelons prefer to uphold the delusional business-as-usual game following the war, the wider socio-cultural realm shows much healthier signs of critical self-regard.
When cinematographer Rudolf Vatinyan passed away from COVID-related complications in 2020, people eulogized about an exacting professional who had filmed a number of iconic films. No one remembered, however, that Vatinyan had a parallel creative passion.
How a black evening handbag found among countless items in Yerevan’s largest flea market revealed a paradigmatic shift from the egalitarian criteria of Soviet ideology, which accorded functional objects with purely practical properties.
Although performance art has practically disappeared from the contemporary art scene as an autonomous medium, early practitioners had a profound impact in changing perceptions of the body in Armenia’s post-independence culture.
Hybridizing fine art and mass culture, Soviet-era “chekanka” art generated an unconventional visual world in which ancient and modern mythologies, as well as sexual and political desires could be blended into a patently local cultural narrative.
Vigen Galstyan explores the humble charm of Soviet Armenian mechanical clocks in this first instalment of a series of articles about Armenia’s not-too-distant past as a major producer of everyday consumer goods and a hot spot for industrial design in the USSR.
EVN Report’s mission is to empower Armenia, inspire the diaspora and inform the world through sound, credible and fact-based reporting and commentary. Our goal is to increase public trust in the media. EVN Report is the media arm of EVN News Foundation registered in the Republic of Armenia in 2017.
