2024 was a full-throttle cultural tsunami for Armenia with an unprecedented number of major exhibitions, festivals, concerts and other events that dispelled any doubts about the country’s cultural vitality both locally and internationally. No surprise then that January was something of a “morning after” daze. However, if early signs are any indication, 2025 is only going to build on last year’s momentum with (hopefully) bolder, smarter and more innovative projects. For those of you who are eager to jump back into the cultural whirlpool, we’ve covered the first slate of events for 2025, as well as some exhibitions from December that are still available to view.

EXHIBITION

One of Yerevan’s best-kept secrets, the Museum of Russian Art at the Cascade has a respectable track record of small yet captivating exhibitions that should get more public exposure than they do. And despite its very specific profile, the Museum has diversified its programming in recent years to present shows on interesting subjects far beyond the confines of Russian art. Their latest exhibition, which opened back in December and will be running until April 1, is devoted to scales. Collated from different museums and private collections, the show surveys the evolution of this vital everyday mechanism from medieval times to the Soviet era and includes all kinds of devices used to measure everything from groceries to precious metals. The exhibition is at once compact and dense, giving the visitor a chance to study each of the objects in detail and reveal the historical, as well as metaphorical aspects of this perennial testament to the human obsession with measurement and value.

Exhibition: “SCALE”, historical-artistic exhibition
Where: Museum of Russian Art
38 Isahakyan St., Yerevan
Dates: December 28-April 1

•

HayArt Centre continues to position itself as one of the main platforms for international contemporary art in Yerevan. Currently on view in two of the “barrel” halls of its iconic building is the first solo exhibition of Macedonian painter Mice Jankulovski in Armenia called The 41st Parallel. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first-ever exhibition of any Macedonian artist in the country. Emerging in the late 1960s as part of the burgeoning Yugoslavian avant-garde circles, Jankulovski has become a prominent representative of monochromatic and post-modern abstraction. In recent decades, his work has largely focused on the exploration of light and depth, which he investigates via thickly layered and “carved” black canvases. Evidently inspired by Richard Serra and Pierre Soulages’ investigations of black’s formal and metaphysical properties, Jankulovski’s work feels like an elegant, but also somewhat anachronistic echo of the raw, primal power of his predecessors’ oeuvre. Still, it’s very nice to see the stern brutalism of HayArt’s halls serving the kind of art that they were always meant to house.

Exhibition: “The 41st Parallel”, Mice Jankulovski
Where: HayArt Centre
7a Mashtots Ave., Yerevan
Dates: December 13-January 13 (Extended until February 13)

•

Gallery of Armenia, where Lousineh Navasartian is presenting her monumental drawing Silence alongside a video projection documenting the six-month process of the work’s making. Triggered by the 2020 Artsakh War and its horrific aftermath, Navasartian’s deceptively laconic image of a rising column of black smoke plays with viewer’s perception to ask some highly pertinent questions about the gray zone between life and death, catastrophe and rebirth. By shifting our attention from the mournful symbolism of the bleak spectacle to the bustling movement of colors and circular forms within it, the artist underlines the need to search for the life-enforcing energies in the void left by war’s eviscerating impact. It’s a spiritually empowering and much-needed message that is reinforced by Navasartian’s technically brilliant and conceptually precise execution that will certainly go down in history as one of the first truly significant gestures of post-war contemporary Armenian art. 

Exhibition: “Silence”, Lousineh Navasartian
Where: National Gallery of Armenia
Republic Square, Yerevan
Dates: January 21-February 2 (Extended until February 16)

•

There is another emerging female practitioner who is debuting on the art scene with drawings. Rather expectedly for a young artist, Amassia Nizbilian’s quirky, wiry images shown at NPAK revolve around the questions of the body and its discombobulating manifestations. More often naked than not, her long-haired female characters glide through a world that is at once ordinary and uncannily strange, processing everything around them through the sensory channels of their bodies. These quite cartoonish escapades (clearly indebted to the animated films of Robert Sahakyants) ambivalently waltz about in search of meaning, evidently prompted by unresolved emotional issues of belonging and desire for freedom. Though these vague tribulations don’t lead anywhere particularly specific, or new, Nizbilian should be commended for the refreshing ease and directness with which she voices the explosive volatility of young female sexuality. 

Exhibition: “Corpo-real”, Amassia Niziblian
Where: NPAK
1/3 Buzand St., Yerevan
Dates: January 24-February 28

•

While Marcos Grigoryan may finally be getting a museum of his own in Yerevan, he remains far from receiving the local and international recognition granted to his contemporary, Sergei Parajanov. This is a crying shame, as Grigoryan’s influence on the evolution of 20th-century contemporary art is in many ways comparable to Parajanov in both its scale and depth. Drawing on the personal and artistic connections between these two titans of 20th century Armenian culture, the Literature and Arts Museum is presenting an exhibition of a single artefact which evokes their mutual interests in traditional crafts and textiles. After befriending Grigoryan in New York in 1988, Parajanov sent him a 19th century “honey” carpet from Syunik as a gift. Grigoryan responded by sending back a photograph of himself “wearing” the carpet in a typically Parajanovian get-up. As trivial as the incident may be, it speaks volumes about how artefacts act as transmitters of cultural memory, aggregating and sustaining creative and intellectual networks across numerous divides.

Exhibition: “Marcos Grigorian and Parajanov: A Tale of One Object”, temporary exhibition
Where: Museum of Literature and Art
1 Aram St., Yerevan
Dates: Open from January 17

•

“The frontier is not a border, but a condition.” This is the statement accompanying Slovenian-based Bagrat Azaryan’s solo exhibition at the Yerevan Museum of Modern Art. It’s an idea that is brought home with an illustrative bluntness in the artist’s large, digitally made “paintings” depicting moody and expressive abstract forms mixed in with distorted fragments of urban environments, Armenian letters and an assortment of other warped details. And just in case the viewer doesn’t get the point, a handful of painted stones are laid out on the floor like splinters that have dropped out of these digital meta-realms. However, despite all the pathos of splattered blobs of “paint” and morphing imagery, the invocation of sublime, transformative states is rather thin here, just like the actual works themselves.

Exhibition: “Frontier”, Bagrat Arazyan
Where: Yerevan Modern Art Museum 
7 Mashtots Ave., Yerevan
Dates: January 25-February 16

•

Armenia presents a unique case in archaeology, having largely escaped the colonial European excavations of the 19th and early 20th centuries that ravaged countless sites in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece. But a few adventurous visitors did venture to our mountains in search of ancient civilizations. One of the first was Jacques de Morgan, a French engineer stationed at the Akhtala copper mine in the late 1880s. With his background in archaeological research, Morgan soon realized that the region was replete with Bronze Age burials and eventually dug up 576 graves. His findings were significant in positioning Armenia as a key center of metal production and an important link between Mesopotamian and European cultures. After leaving Akhtala, he took most of the excavated objects to France and some of them are currently kept at the National Archaeology Museum in Paris. The History Museum of Armenia has co-organized an exhibition featuring five of the more notable objects from Morgan’s excavations, augmenting it with findings from the same areas made by local scientists in the 1990s. Despite its small scale, the show provides a glimpse into archaeological beginnings in the region, and a look at the objects that triggered Europe’s fascination with Armenia’s past. Now, what I’d like to know is where are all the other treasures from those 576 graves?

Exhibition: “Yesterday and Today: In the Footsteps of Jacques de Morgan”
Where: History Museum of Armenia  Republic Square, Yerevan
Dates: December 12-March 11

•

Popular culture and, by default, the popular imagination often see artists as unruly, messy beings who cavort in the chaos of their studios waiting for divine inspiration to strike. The new exhibition at the Cafesjian Centre for the Arts gives the visitor an opportunity to rethink these stereotypical projections. Featuring a minute recreation of multidisciplinary artist Gayane Avetisyan’s studio, the show Mejtegh transports us into the secretive space where art begins to materialize out of thin air. Well, it’s not all that mystical really. Though it may appear a bit of a mess to the uninitiated, Avetisyan’s studio is an intimate world with its own logic and order. The viewer is invited to slowly put together the pieces of the puzzle, discovering the various systems, tools and links through which the artist molds her art into being. Most importantly, the studio becomes a reflective pool for the intellectual processes that take place in the artist’s mind, an undeniable testament to the fact that art is as much a result of a meticulous work ethic, as it is of any innate ability to see beyond the rational and the ordinary. 

Exhibition: “Mejtegh”, Gayane Avetissian
Where: Cafesjian Center for the Arts  
10 Tamanyan St., Yerevan
Dates: November 22-March 30

•

SCREENINGS

It’s no surprise that the rapid encroachment of AI into our lives has become a central theme in contemporary art and cinema. The subject is hardly new to film, which has explored the uncanny rise of human-made technological beings since the late 1970s in now-iconic works like Blade Runner, RoboCop, The Terminator, and many others. But while those movies approached their subjects as nightmarish doomsday scenarios from the far away future, recent cinematic efforts treat it as something patently tangible and just a few clicks away from our own everyday normality. Director Drew Hancock’s Companion joins the parade of “robo-dread” tales like Ex-Machina, Her, M3gan and other, lesser clones, to tackle the ethical grey zone of humanity’s relationship with technological sentience. At its core, Companion is a clever and immensely entertaining slasher film that plays on our existential fears of the Other. But it does so by subversively turning the tables on the viewer, drawing our empathy toward subjects and situations which unravel seemingly unshakable moral foundations and beliefs. And as unashamedly exploitative some of its base objectives may be, this is a film whose grand questions about the nature of life and the human obsession with control feel terrifyingly pertinent and very much of the moment.

Screening: “Companion”, Drew Hancock
Where: Kino Park and Cinema Star

•