Et Cetera

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.

Attitudes toward food and culinary art can reveal much about a people’s past and future. Ella Kanagerian writes that we are trying to work with our cultural influences and approach the concept of national cuisine more consciously.

Electronic dance music, as a relatively new cultural phenomenon, could have been occupied by women, but even here, the presence of men is predominant and women have to fight for fair representation.

Director Nora Martirosyan’s film “Should the Wind Drop” reveals the frustrating situation surrounding the airport as a starting point to delve into the history, problems and spirit of Artsakh.

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.

The “Top Ten of Rabiz” was a series of albums produced by a group of young men trying to reproduce the scattered reality of the 1990s through the language of music and an experimental format that was never really “rabiz.”

The Armenian love for following trends is something that is a part of the collective cultural and political history. And that tendency became stronger after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Songs of Solomon” promises to tell the story of young Komitas but ends up disappointing as the direction drastically changes, turning into another tragic film about the Armenian Genocide and Komitas simply a faded symbol emphasizing a lost culture and history.

Literary theorist Tigran Amiryan takes the reader on a journey into the essence of Aram Pachyan's experimental novel "P/F", noting that while it might not appeal to aficionados of fictional prose it will cause an unquenchable thirst for contemplation.