Armenian Art and the World: Insights from Festival Week-end à l’Est

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Inspired by the enduring legacies of Camus, Proust and Delacroix—who once graced Paris’ 5th and 6th arrondissements—the artistic neighborhood surrounding the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Odeon Theatre transforms each November into a vibrant crossroads of creativity and intercultural exchange during the Festival Week-end à l’Est, a tradition since 2016.

The festival has spotlighted various cultures over the years. In 2021, it focused on Bulgaria, featuring prominent artists like Stefan Nikolaev. His installation “Minouk, le poisson peintre” (1994/2003) offered a philosophical yet whimsical meditation on creation and mortality. The following year, the festival turned its attention to Ukraine, showing solidarity with a nation enduring the ravages of war. It featured acclaimed installation artist Igor Gusev, whose work interweaves mythology, folklore, and art history. The 7th edition in 2023 celebrated Georgian culture with a rich program of cinema, literature, and music, including a screening of Elene Naveriani’s feminist political drama “Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry” (2023).

Fostering cultural dialogues with a single city from Central or Eastern Europe, the festival is setting its course towards Yerevan, Armenia for its 8th edition, following Warsaw, Kyiv, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, Odessa, and Tbilisi. 

This 10-day festival features a diverse program. At the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe Tigran Hamasyan will perform contemporary music. La Gaîté Lyrique will feature Hayk Koroi’s immersive compositions that, while far from classical, sometimes incorporate melodies from folk songs to create a modern “indigenous” soundscape. Cinema clubs will screen classic films like Sergei Parajanov’s “Sayat Nova”, preceded by Canadian-Armenian filmmaker Gariné Torossian’s “Girl from Moush”. Shoghakat Vardanyan’s documentary “1489,” winner of the IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, will also be shown. The program includes panels such as a masterclass on “Writing in Western Armenian Today” by renowned French-Armenian novelist and literary critic Krikor Beledian, and a lecture on Soviet Modernist architecture by Ruben Arevshatyan. The diverse debates also serve as meeting grounds for different generations of creatives, including Artavazd Peleshian, Melik Ohanian and Andrei Ujica. 

Vera Michalski-Hoffmann, the festival’s founder, is a publisher and president of several publishing houses in Switzerland, France and Poland. She is also a major shareholder in Roche Holding and splits her time between Lausanne and Paris. With her husband, Polish intellectual Jan Michalski, she launched initiatives promoting Slavic culture. Michalski, born into a family affected by Stalinist terror, was deeply sensitive to Poland’s cultural struggles. In 1986, the couple co-founded Éditions Noir sur Blanc in Montricher. Their aim was to publish Slavic writers and offer literature, essays and memoirs capturing key historical moments in Poland, Lithuania and Russia.

For Michalski-Hoffmann, “a true Europe is one where people share the richness of their cultures.” Building on their passion for promoting cultural exchanges with Eastern European countries that share a common history—particularly during the Soviet occupation and Iron Curtain era—the Michalski-Hoffmann duo co-founded Festival du Week-end à l’Est with artistic director Brigitte Bouchard. This initiative aimed to expand their focus beyond Eastern Europe.

Brief Overview of Armenian Art at the Festival

The 8th edition of Week-end à l’Est will serve as one of the largest showcases of Armenian contemporary art in Paris in recent years. Spread across six venues, it offers visitors a non-linear experience that represents the full diversity of the Armenian contemporary art scene following the 2020 Artsakh War. The 22 Visconti Gallery on Rue Visconti will host the solo exhibition of Khachatur Martirosyan, a master of Armenian abstract painting. On the parallel street, the Crous Art Gallery features nine artists in the group exhibition “Et les Frontières Deviennent des Ponts” (Where Borders Become Bridges), spanning three venues: La Librairie Galerie Métamorphoses, La Galerie d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, and La Galerie d’Art du Crous de Paris. A short distance away, the Espaces des Femmes-Antoinette Fouque[1] presents photographer Nazik Armenakyan’s solo show “Red Black White”.

Though not chosen intentionally, the historical site of venerated French conceptual artists’ Christo and Jean-Claude’s installation “Wall of Barrels” near the festival venues, holds symbolic significance. It ties back to their philosophy of criticizing division and strengthening connections between Eastern European countries. Christo’s nephew, Vladimir Yavachev, explained in an interview that geopolitics had shaped his uncle throughout his life. He pointed out, “It wasn’t just the Berlin Wall, but the entire Cold War and the division between East and West. Especially because Christo truly escaped—he was a political refugee.”[2] 

In the group show “Et les Frontières Deviennent des Ponts,” unexpected encounters and confrontations highlight the multidisciplinary nature of the Armenian art scene. To subvert symbols, mythologies, and traditional techniques, the exhibition brings together artists from different generations. While addressing issues tied to Armenia’s socio-political context, artists like Garush Melkonyan and Araks Sahakyan embrace multiculturalism, creating dialogues across cultures, artistic practices, mediums, and histories.

The image of Armenia and its people has often been portrayed in the poetic imagination and in literature as a metaphor for “wanderers” or a mythopoetic land of origins. This vision presented a utopian homeland, enriched by heroic tales that depicted the country as a timeless and sacred space, with borders drawn from the biblical contours of paradise. Krikor Beledian, interpreting the “symbolic territory” of Nairi mentioned by Vahan Terian, asserts that “spiritual Armenia” approaches a conception of cultural identity. Far from being a natural given, it is the result of a deliberate effort—a voluntary action aimed at infusing “material” Armenia with a life it lacks. In a 2007 essay, Beledian describes this identity as an ongoing formulation, acknowledging it as a product of multiple combinations and processes in a state of perpetual “becoming”. This imagination, once fueled by wandering and heroic narratives, is now evolving into a more dynamic, culturally driven conception of identity—one not confined to a single perception. It involves a constant questioning of national narratives and the reinterpretation of symbols and structures.

By placing artistic practices at the center of this discourse, the goal of the festival is to highlight the various mediums artists have used throughout different eras in Armenian contemporary art in Armenia. These practices act as Ariadne’s thread, offering insight into the ever-evolving landscape that continually shapes and reshapes itself. This approach challenges the idea of a single, authentic myth, instead embracing art as a dynamic process of ongoing creation and renewal.

The Crous Art Gallery serves as a platform for dialogue between 1970s avant-garde artists and young contemporary Armenian artists, both from Armenia or France. In this space, as in the other two collective venues, borders as zones of dialogue and conflict are explored. The exhibition opens with conceptual film-based works of Hamlet Hovsepian, “Sleep” (1977-2002) and “Head” (1975), pioneering examples of video art in the Caucasus. Vahram Aghasian’s “Ghost City” (2005-2007) reflects the haunting legacy of the Soviet era, its abandoned modernist ruins standing as a stark reminder of unrealized ambitions and utopian dreams. Alongside these works are pieces by younger artists such as Meri Karapetyan, Edik Boghosian, Davit Kochunts, and the AHA Collective. Gohar Martirosyan’s “Inaccessible Depths” (2021) explores our connection to the places we inhabit, delving into identity formation through our relationships with territories and blurring the lines between biography and geography.

The Galerie Librairie Métamorphoses presents a surrealist scene, blending enigmatic figurative forms with dystopian realism that highlight the fragility of the human condition. In contrast, artists of the Galerie d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais offer a more intimate interpretation of our relationship to body and space—both individual and collective—under extreme conditions like displacement or exile. These spaces are either embodied or, conversely, expressed through abstraction. 

In Narek Barseghyan’s landscape series “Chère Arménie” (2023), we see deeply authentic “portraits” of conflict zones that are neither photographic nor topographical. Areg Balayan’s documentary photo series “MOB (Military Mobilization)” (2016) highlights the ambivalence of the camera as both an “objective” recording tool and a “weapon”. Garush Melkonyan’s “Visionaries” (2022) uses lithophane, an early cinematic technique, to reveal hidden images on porcelain plates through pre-existing photographs unified by similar body postures, creating an uncanny effect. Collectively, these artists explore complex narratives of the self and the body in relation to Armenia’s intricate political landscape, arriving at dramatically different critical and perceptual destinations.  

Rather than imposing coherence or unity, the festival highlights the diversity within the Armenian art scene. Demonstrating an artistic landscape that continues to evolve through ongoing renewal—neither a blank page nor a finished work, but a page in the process of being written.

A Behind-the-Scenes Look  

 Though the number of local festivals in Armenia is growing each year, there is some confusion about how their function differs from traditional exhibitions in terms of format and goals. International festivals aim for cultural exchange and experimentation, offering vibrant, multidisciplinary approaches across various venues. In contrast, traditional exhibitions are more focused, providing a static presentation of art in a single venue.  

“Even though a festival must try to cater to all audiences, unlike many artistic events, a festival can free itself from the need for one or more themes,” says the exhibition’s co-curator, art critic Alain Berland, who also curated the Le Havre Biennale in 2012.

The visual arts exhibitions of the Week-end à l’Est offer a journey through diverse artistic profiles. Polyphony, a key feature, guides visitors across six venues. This allows the audience in the host country to engage openly with the artworks and create their own narratives, without being overly guided in any one direction.

The curatorial approach here eschews a unifying discourse or projected ideologies. Instead, it sometimes brings the chosen artworks together solely for their artistic value, influenced by subjective considerations and relevance to Paris’s contemporary artistic scene. The goal is to showcase Armenia’s artistic scene in a new context, creating bridges between two realms. This opens up space for cultural and critical engagement with the “other” as well as with one’s own identity, which can emerge differently in a new environment.  

While previous editions of the Week-end à l’Est have typically focused on a capital city from an Eastern European country, this year’s visual arts exhibition program is characterized by decentralization. This shift is driven by Armenia’s unique territorial and geopolitical context. Consequently, Alain Berland and I felt it necessary to address the complexities and challenges of centralization, which often places a disproportionate focus on artists based in the capital.

Moving away from the capital, numerous Armenian artists are increasingly drawn to the realities of the country’s regions, focusing on border towns and villages, and the experiences of the people living there. These contradictory spaces inspire a distinctive style of creation that unfolds through intertwined mediums and fields of study. An example is the “Living Portals” project in 2022 by AHA Collective, which invited visual artists and architects to explore the relationship between contemporary art and habitat in Armenia’s southern Syunik region. Shaped by the territory and constrained by its challenges, artists are compelled to address issues faced by the site, which is threatened by both cultural loss and military aggression. This demands a “rooted” relationship with these places, pushing artistic practice from the “center” into new and unexpected directions. 

The preparation process showcased the participants’ enthusiasm and Armenia’s openness to cultural exchange, while also revealing underlying challenges. A lack of experience with logistics—such as transporting artwork and communication with artists who often lack intermediary galleries or curators for technical and administrative support—exposed the fragility of Armenia’s artistic infrastructure. During his research visit to Yerevan, curator Berland observed very few galleries, leading him to conclude that contemporary Armenian artists lack adequate platforms to exhibit and represent their work. For many artists in the group show, this exhibition marks their first international exposure, highlighting the scarcity of global connections and networking opportunities for these emerging artists.

The exhibition emphasizes artists primarily from Armenia, highlighting the vitality of the contemporary art scene there. It also acknowledges the growing significance of artistic practices within the Armenian diaspora. This focus is complemented by an expansion of contemporary art’s scope to include artists who have recently settled in France—whether for personal reasons or as economic and cultural migrants. Their presence helps forge valuable connections between Armenian and French cultures.  

Since festivals focusing on Armenia from abroad are relatively rare, it is crucial to use this opportunity to reassess the local scene and its adaptability. This can help improve or build the necessary infrastructure and logistics, ensuring better preparation for similar events in the future.

*Vardouhi Kirakosyan is the co-curator of the festival’s visual arts program.

Footnotes:

[1] The Galerie des Femmes was founded in 1981 by Antoinette Fouque, in connection with the publishing house and bookstore Des Femmes in Paris, with which it shared space until 1992, at 74 Rue de Seine.
[2] Vladimir Yavachev, interview with the author, July 15, 2022.

Et Cetera

[Art Speak]