
It was just four years ago at this time that the entire nation was reeling from the horrific 44 Day War in Artsakh that saw thousands of our young men die, many more lose their homes, followed by a protracted and unimaginably cruel “program” of Artsakh’s ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan. The wounds are still open and it may take decades for us to really come to terms with this catastrophe; something which none of us have been able to either properly assess or comprehend. One thing is clear, we must firmly step on the path of collective self-reflection, healing and a renaissance of sorts in order to break through a vicious cycle that’s been gnawing at our foundations since the turn of the past century. Could art—contemporary and historical—possibly show us the way?
EXHIBITIONS

Can an artist really transform public consciousness? In the case of Yervand Kochar, one may unequivocally say “yes”. When the veteran artist installed the final version of his majestic Sasuntsi Davit statue in front of Yerevan’s Central Railway Station in 1959, the sculpture instantly crystalized the repressed anger and frustration of the nation that had been forced to bury the traumatic memory of the 1915 Genocide. It also rekindled a spiritual fire that symbolically urged Armenia towards a cultural and economic advancement in the coming decades. But the strength of Kochar’s art has always been in its universalist resonance and ambition. Having been in the thick of the European avant-garde during the 1920s and 30s, this is an artist who witnessed and astutely reflected on the profound transformations of humanity that led to his remarkably prescient visions of our future. On the 125th anniversary of the master’s birth, the National Gallery of Armenia is holding a new retrospective exhibition that will re-introduce the breathtaking scale of the artist’s oeuvre and invention to local audiences. Far ahead of his time, Kochar’s legacy still retains relevant lessons on the infinite human ability to survive, invent and envisage new ways of being and seeing. One not to miss!
Exhibition: “Crossing time and space”, Yervand Kochar
Where: National Gallery of Armenia
Republic Square, Yerevan
Dates: October 30-November 30
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The burden of surviving the everyday is the central topic of an exhibition held at the Hovhannisyan Institute called “Sovorakan” (Ordinary). Featuring works by a duo of talented conceptual artists Astghik Melkonyan and Mikael Martirosyan, the exhibition addresses the ways in which we structure life as a daily struggle with time and space and how both architecture and social systems define the parameters of our being. The visually “bland” deconstructive, research-generated approach of both of these artists essentially consists of a bunch of diagrams and a floor plan and may be the antithesis of what most viewers in Armenia consider as “art”. But the experience of delving deep into their conceptual propositions is a heady intellectual pleasure.
Exhibition: “Sovorakan”, Astghik Melkonyan, Mikael Martirosyan
Where: Johannissyan Institute
19 Khanjyan St., 5th floor, Yerevan
Dates: Open from October 19
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Millions of people make art as a hobby on a daily basis all over the world. But very few of them manage to do actual art. Because the process towards generating real Art is generally a long and arduous journey of intellectual and technical exploration that requires relentless total physical and emotional investment and sense of purpose. So the boundary between mere creative expression and art-making can oftentimes be vague and ambivalent. The good folks at Panprojekt multidisciplinary art center in Yerevan offer a much-needed platform for people of all ages who are interested in probing the pleasures (and agonies) of artistic work in various media—from painting and printmaking to sculpture and various crafts. Now, the results of their studio activities have been brought together in a large group exhibition with over 20 participants, which will be held at the Zangak bookstore exhibition space. Exactly what brings together this motley group of students and art lovers isn’t quite clear, but one can always have fun deducing which of them shows real artistic promise and who is merely passing their time doodling away.
Exhibition: “Collective Fragment”, PanProjekt
Where: Zangak Bookstore
7 Abovyan St., Yerevan
Dates: November 1-December 1
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Talking about students. I always berate myself for not taking the time to visit more graduate exhibitions, which are regularly held by the art institutions in Yerevan and Gyumri. Today’s students are tomorrow’s masters and for anyone involved in the arts, spotting promising talents early on should be a priority. The Terlemezyan Arts College has served as the alma mater for hundreds of notable Armenian artists since the 1920s and it continues to do so today, despite its rather antiquated teaching program. This week, the College will present a show of fourth-year graduates in a variety of media—from painting to design—and it’s a good opportunity to see how our Gen Z creatives are thinking and articulating their past, present and hopefully, their future.
Exhibition: “22 Glances”, group exhibition
Where: Terlemezyan Gallery
39 Arshakunyats St., Yerevan
Dates: Open from November 1
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One of the elder graduates of the Terlemezyan Art College is the artist Martiros Badalyan who spent many years working in theater and cinema, but is better-known for his assemblage-collages, a medium that became something of a pernicious trend in the 1970s and 1980s as late-Soviet artists scrambled to make “innovative” works about their inner spiritual worlds. It was all meant to be an antithesis of official Soviet art but, sadly, much of this “experimental” dillydallying ended up manifesting the degradation and flattening that was inflicted upon the artistic imaginaries by the oppressive totalitarian culture. In this historical sense, there is something curiously moving to be found in Badalyan’s wistful paintings and collages made up of discarded and irrelevant fragments of bygone objects and ideas, which have been brought together in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Vanadzor Museum of Fine Arts.
Exhibition: “In Retrospect”, Martiros Badalyan
Where: Vanadzor Fine Arts Museum
52 Tigran Mets St., Vanadzor
Dates: October 24-November 9
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The spirit of experimentation and quiet resistance to the homogenizing Soviet cultural rhetoric is also evident in the mini-retrospective of ceramic artist Gagik Alumyan, organized by the Sardarapat Ethnography Museum. Based on the artist’s recent donation of his works to the Museum, this show reveals the quite impressive heights achieved by local ceramic arts during the 1970s and 1980s. Alumyan’s superlative mastery of various firing and glazing techniques pushed his works far beyond the confines of decorative-applied arts into the realm of sculpture and installation. Despite the expected forays into rather saccharine ethno-historicism, the artist did achieve conceptually bold and radical results with his abstract, organic forms that redefine the possibilities of ceramics as objects of pure aesthetic and philosophical contemplation. Even when making rudimentarily functional items like coffee cups and vases, Alumyan managed to imbue them with wonderfully archaic poetry that turned the encounter with the material into a sort of ritualized engagement with the “stuff” of the earth. This is the kind of legacy (and a tradition) of Armenian modern art that has been largely forgotten and ignored in recent years and is ripe for rediscovery.
Exhibition: “Solo Exhibition”, Gagik Alumyan
Where: Sardarapat Ethnography Museum
Daniel-Bek Pirumyan St., Araks village
Dates: Open from November 29
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In recent years, the traditional crafts have increasingly come under the attention of contemporary artists as a way of redressing the technological sublime and the flattening of local identity through the onslaught of globalization. I am completely in the dark as to how the duo of young interdisciplinary artists—Mila Harutyunyan and Margarita Astvatsaturyan—working under the umbrella of self-initiated platform E-Collective are planning to interpolate the craft of rug-making, sound art and interactive audience engagement (as the exhibition announcement claims) in their collaborative show “Dictation” at the Folk Arts Museum. But the very idea of combining these opposing mediums is already full of promise, especially since the project is curated by one of the most talented Armenian contemporary dancers, Toma Aydinyan. I, for one, am ready to be entangled in some thread-making.
Exhibition: “Dictation”, Mila Harutyunyan, Margarita Astvatsatryan
Where: Folk Arts Museum
64 Abovyan St., Yerevan
Dates: November 1-30
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When craft becomes art, it can be a truly sublime experience. However, “crafty-art” is generally anything but. The mixed-media paintings of Angelica Khosroeva, showing at the artist’s solo exhibition in Dalan Gallery are a case in point. Using a mixture of drawing, acrylics and various collaged elements, Khosroeva creates rather florid scenes of stylized figures floating in some highly ornamentalized fairy-tale world. One assumes that these purposefully “weird” squiggles are meant to be an alternative realm of subjective imagination. But the result here is sadly redolent of a craft-class project based on a naive cross-breeding of Soviet cartoons and batik art, with a depth of ideas as thin as the colored paper it is cut-out from.
Exhibition: “Solo Exhibition”, Angelica Khosroeva
Where: Dalan Art Gallery
12 Abovyan St., Yerevan
Dates: October 29-November 3
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Sometimes, one comes across an artist who poses a quandary. There is a distinctive manner of image-making and a strong point of view. But then one starts to feel the lack of intellectual weight and specific insight into the chosen subject and the initial aesthetic pull of the works evaporates like a drop of water under sunlight. Lilit Manaryan’s urban landscapes, which will soon be shown in her solo exhibition at Arno Babajanyan concert hall, have a similar effect. Her focus is on Yerevan’s peripheral regions, a fascinating topic ripe for aesthetic and anthropological analysis. But the artist’s atmospheric renditions of the concrete jungle don’t really have much to propose except a rather melancholic invocation of urban ennui.
Exhibition: “Endless Suburb”, Lilit Manaryan
Where: Arno Babajanyan Concert Hall
2 Abovyan St., Yerevan
Dates: November 1-14
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The Museum of Russian Art has a show that also looks at the urban environment, but from a cross-cultural and historical perspective. Drawn from the rich and largely unseen collections of graphic art held at the Dilijan Local Lore and Fine Art Museum, this small, but very worthwhile exhibition provides a broad overview of how twentieth-century artists began to portray the city environment as a material manifestation of local identity, and a kind of ‘diagram’ for the flow of history. The combination of works by Soviet-Armenian, diasporan and foreign artists provides a further layer here, which allows the viewer to discern both parallels, but also distinct cultural differences in how these practitioners read the social significance of the city as heritage and collective memory.
Exhibition: “Urban Images: Witnesses of Heritage”
Where: Museum of Russian Art
38 Isahakyan St., Yerevan
Dates: Until November 1
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Exhibitions of private collections are an infrequent sight in Armenia, where the culture of collecting and sharing art with the public is still something of an anomaly. So when there is a show that includes some previously unseen art by masters like Yervand Kochar, Rudolf Khachatryan, Gohar Fermanyan, Artashes Hovsepyan and the mega-rare Hakobjan Gharibjanyan, one must take notice. Especially since these works have been assembled by a woman collector—an even bigger cultural anomaly. The logic (or sensibility) that has brought together the objects in Karine Kazanjyan’s collection—ranging from early Soviet-Armenian painters to contemporary artists like Henri Elibekyan and Kiki—appears to be entirely based on the collector’s aesthetic and emotional predilections, rather than on any historically- or conceptually-grounded systemic approach. But that, in itself, isn’t such a bad thing, as these more loose and unencumbered collations of diverse artworks allow one to draw unexpected parallels and associations, which are often lost in traditional museum displays and academic exhibitions. And there can never be enough fresh angles through which one could discover and rediscover the art of the past.
Exhibition: “Personal Space։ Collector’s View”
Where: Nikolay Nikoghosyan Foundation
19-21 Saryan St., Yerevan
Dates: November 8-29
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FESTIVALS

The most exciting event in the fall cultural calendar is undoubtedly the launch of the first Yerevan Photo Fest, which will take place from October 28 till the end of November. Though technically not the first photo festival held in Armenia or Yerevan, this particular initiative (instigated and sponsored by the Yerevan Municipality) promises to be of an altogether different caliber and, hopefully, of a continuous nature. Curated by Karen Mirzoyan, one of the most prominent Armenian photographers, the festival will present an array of both contemporary and historic photography from across the world through exhibitions, artist talks and workshops. The presence of international luminaries such as Newsha Tavakolian as well as the renegade photobook publisher Dienacht is already a cause for celebration for all those who love and appreciate photography as an art form. OK, full disclosure is in order. I’m biased here, since the festival will also include the first posthumous exhibition of Hakob Hekekyan’s seminal, mid-century photographs of Yerevan, curated by yours truly. As the official TASS correspondent for Armenia and the author of the first proper photo book published in the country, Hekekyan occupies a hugely significant place in the annals of Armenian photography, yet his work has unjustly been forgotten for over four decades. The festival will provide an overdue occasion to rediscover this neglected master, along with many other fascinating encounters with contemporary photo practitioners.
Festival: “Yerevan Photo Fest”
Where: Multiple venues, see website for details
Dates: October 28-November 30
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CINEMA

The local cinema screens have again overdone themselves with the paucity of cinematically noteworthy screenings. So the appearance of the Palme d’Or-winning dramedy Anora in two limited screenings at the Cinema House seems like a blessing against the soul-crushing background of vapid blockbuster sequels, brainless action films and trashy Armenian comedies. Or does it? Anora has sharply divided critics, some of whom have called out Sean Baker’s film for its superficial and exploitative take on sex workers and ethnic minorities like Uzbeks and Armenians. Yes, the Armenians are prominently featured as a duo of incompetent, guileless and violent criminals working under a cruel Russian oligarch. Not pretty, Sean. There’s meant to be some kind of redemptive aspect to this less than flattering representation, but frankly it’s high time we called out the relentless (mis)casting of Armenians and other Middle-Eastern nationalities in American cinema as the new epitome of the human cesspit—no matter how much one might enjoy witnessing the surreal sight of Vache Tovmasyan clowning his way through an internationally-awarded auteur film.
Screening: “Anora”, Sean Baker
Where: Moscow Cinema
18 Abovyan St., Yerevan
Dates: October 30, 31, 7:30 p.m.
*English with Armenian subtitles