Ariga Torosian: High Fashion Made in the Margins
Perched on a Yerevan rooftop, the Museum of New Analogies blurs the line between art, architecture, and everyday life—an ephemeral, sound-sensitive space for experimental installations, quiet performances, and surreal encounters high above the city's layered chaos. Read more
Armenia's horror subculture is gaining momentum, led by YouTuber-turned-author Ruben Yesayan. His bestselling books, rooted in local myths and unsettling landscapes, are drawing a young fanbase, even as some critics dismiss his sensational, camp-infused style as unserious. Read more
Nestled in the outskirts of the southern Armenian town of Kapan, Darmanadzor is a soulful teahouse where Artur Patvakanyan serves hand-foraged herbal blends. Rooted in ancestral wisdom and personal healing, his teas offer comfort, connection and a quiet resistance to modern haste. Read more
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EVN Report
13 hours ago
- EVN Report
Thea Farhadian's 'Tattoos and Other Markings'
Farhadian's evocation of a cultural past using a mechanical, abstracted soundscape, first distances the listener who finds the sound at hand alien, before they realize that they have actually been drawn into the past the same way that a patient might under guided hypnosis. Farhadian approaches trauma through sounds that appear to be similar to the scratching of needles on old-style vinyl records. The introduction of the voice of Komitas Vartabed send chills down one's spine. The choice of Komitas, the father of Armenian liturgical and folk music who was released from captivity after being deported thanks to the intervention of the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau Sr., is doubly relevant today given the ongoing genocidal onslaught on the Palestinian people in Gaza. Farhadian's first solo album, 'Tectonic Shifts' (Creative Sources CS 365), featured solo violin and real-time processing that introduced listeners to an echo chamber of experimental sound. Reviewer Massimo Ricci has written: 'What separates her from the typical…tedium- transmitting specimens, is the ability to render the most absurd-sounding complications with sensible unambiguity.' Farhadian has performed in some of the world's premiere music venues, including Issue Project Room, the Downtown Music Gallery, and Alternative Museum—all in New York City—as well as the Aram Khachaturian Museum in Yerevan, Armenia. An artistic polymath, she has also curated experimental video and co-founded the New York and San Francisco Armenian Film Festivals. The composer explains that she grew up listening to Armenian music at home—both folk and sacred—which eventually led her to study Arabic music with the renowned Palestinian oud and violin master Simon Shaheen: 'I fell in love with the Arabic maqamat and began to feel more freedom using these modes to compose and play music.' Until recently it was rare to find an American-born artist who had mastered both the European and Arabic classical traditions, as well as a third tradition that is quite different, as Armenian music is based on a modal system of tetrachords that can repeat indefinitely. In an Other Minds podcast hosted by composer Joseph Bohigian, Farhadian described the process of making this four-track album more like painting than creating music, as details of her past slowly revealed themselves to her like colors on a canvas. The 44-minute long album starts off with Mokats Mirza, a piece that integrates a broader mechanistic soundscape with the voice of Komitas, which weaves in and out of the background sounds. The repetition of the sounds and sequences mimic the repetition steps across the seemingly endless Syrian desert with scant food or water. Strange unidentifiable voices appear in the background. The 18 minute-long Eulogy possesses similar elements but is presented in a more dirge-like manner. At times it resembles a slow-motion recording which offers the listener the opportunity to grieve silently as the music engulfs their senses. The third track, Inscriptions is comprised of industrial sounds that have been processed and shaped out into a soundscape that resides between silence and emptiness. These include scratchings, and sounds that recall a recording machine whose tape is run backwards, an MRI Machine, and a printing press. Here multiple technologies—both advanced and primitive—share a common function of inscribing: letters, tattoos, the inside of one's body. Finally, Farhadian's fourth and final track Gar oo Chgar, (There once was and there was not), bears the title of the traditional opening for Armenian fairytales and fables. Here, the repeated sounds perhaps stand in for needles tattooing the skin or conversely erasing them. The interstices may mirror the emptiness that the marked women experienced first during their long ordeals of captivity and later when liberated and reintegrated into Armenian communities. Farhadian also included the sound of sand falling on the floor of the Aram Khachaturian Hall; a child reciting a poem in Armenian; a recording of the double reed instrument, the duduk. To get a fuller picture of the traumatic experience of deportation, I would pair this remarkable CD. with Elyse Semerdjian's previously mentioned book. I would also add the work of fine artist Linda Ganjian whose recent exhibition 'Her Mind: a Metropolis' at Hudson, New York's Front Row Gallery mixed traditional Armenian motifs and crafts with designs reminiscent of Art Deco to approach her maternal grandmother's experience of survival. As Farhadian reminds people when discussing the personal odyssey which led to her completing 'Tattoos and Other Markings,' discovering this little-known information was chilling, and led her to questions about which cultural narratives are remembered and which are forgotten. In fact, Armenian immigrants to the United States at the turn of the 20th century were made to prove their whiteness, in order to be naturalized American, so the notion of tattooing and marking is doubly pregnant with meaning here. Farhadian's music suggests new avenues for how we hear and represent the past, by leaving the listening experience open- ended rather didactic ways of listening and interpreting. As Liverpool University's James and Constance Alsop Chair of Music Emerita Anahid Kassabian notes: 'This piece invites listeners to make their own connections among the sounds, welcoming all engagements with it. Aesthetically the layers and materials are intriguing, but making the links among them is the listener's option.' The markings left on these women of 1915 by tattoos may be both psychic and mental. And much like the musical notations that mark a page, they offer new pathways to understanding and even perhaps healing the past.
EVN Report
05-08-2025
- EVN Report
ARTINERARY: August 2025
It's been over a year since we launched Artinerary at EVN Report and it's time to make some fixes. Starting this August, in an effort to become more consistent, we'll be switching to monthly editions that will appear in the first week of each month. Of course, since news of cultural events in Armenia is released just days before openings, these editions will be regularly updated to include new entries. That said, it's pretty difficult to pitch anything 'cultured' these days when you're faced with the garish spectacle of our Real-Politik landscape. In a development that would make the Game of Thrones writers jealous, recent episodes of Armenian Power Games have pushed government officials, the clergy and the sundry mess that calls itself the opposition, toward unprecedented levels of ignominy in MMA-style skirmishes on and off the social media. While the long-brewing 'existential' confrontation between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Government was only a matter of time, its timing, and more so, its form, has left everyone gasping in disbelief at the crude machoism of it all—from 'priestly' terrorist plots and masked FBI-style raids on the Mother See to jaw-dropping penis semantics. What's most disturbing, I think, is not so much the open display of the profound rift between the Church and the State, but the face-to-face encounter with the nefarious essence of our society's toxic machoism—the beloved linchpin of Armenian patriarchy. Well, this is what you get for not allowing people any means of collective cultural release – something that the Catholics, Protestants and the Buddhists have regulated so well with their carnivals and fetes that let people mock all forms of authority and morality for a day or two and then go back to more civil forms of obedience or disobedience. Could someone please send these men in suits an annotated copy of Mikhail Bakhtin? JANSEM: THE MASTER OF VIVID LINE Art and entertainment can be an unholy mix, as evidenced by the work of so many post-modern masters like Damien Hurst and Yayoi Kusama, whose quite tacky, but often spectacular installations still confound us with the question as to whether it's all some ingenious ruse or not. But up until the height of modernism in the 1910s, art has always meant to entertain or, at the least, titillate the public to some degree, without necessarily sacrificing its intellectual credentials. lsn't it the thrill of complex visual storytelling that still attracts us to so much Renaissance and Baroque art? The famous French-Armenian painter and graphic artist Jean Jansem (Hovhannes Semerdjian) chose to follow this more traditional trope of visual art when he entered the war-ridden Parisian art scene in the mid-1940s. Though not exactly diverting in their morose dissection of post-war nihilism and angst, Jansem's figurative, social-realist paintings spoke to a public that was tired of all the elitist and obtuse abstract and conceptual art that was being promoted by the art establishment. Branded a 'miserabilist'—a major movement in French and European art of the 1940s-1960s—this first generation descendant of the Armenian Genocide wanted nothing more than to speak directly and clearly about the core human values he deemed to be threatened by unmitigated progress and modernization. As his popularity rose from the mid-1960s onwards, Jansem's work mellowed, becoming more allegorical and palatable for a broad international audience that lined up to buy his distinctively ethereal images of melancholic female models and dancers, still-lifes and urban landscapes. This commercial popularity—bolstered by the artist's uptake of color lithography—has considerably dampened Jansem's credentials, casting him as something of a peddler of misery chic for the bourgeoisie. But this is a wholly undeserved perception, as the new retrospective of Jansem's lithographic work at the National Gallery of Armenia shows . Composed of over 120 lithographic works from the 1960s up to 1990s the artist donated to the Gallery, this first, large-scale survey of his oeuvre in Armenia provides a revealing insight into the highly methodical way Jansem explored the social, aesthetic and philosophical aspects of the subjects he considered to be of urgent and timeless resonance. In a way, his profoundly humanist vision has gained relevance in our troubling reality, coming as a reminder of the elemental empathy and social bonds that we're losing with every bomb in Gaza and every scroll on social media. ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: DESTINATION UNKNOWN When the first Armenian-operated photography studio opened in Constantinople in 1858, few could have predicted the degree to which the Armenians would come to populate this field throughout the next century, or the degree to which the medium would be disregarded by the Armenian cultural establishment thereafter. It was only last month that the National Gallery of Armenia (NGA) finally launched a permanent exhibition space dedicated to photography and new media—the first ever institutional platform of its kind in the country's history. While modest in size, this room marks a momentous shift in the reassessment of the medium as both an art form and a key conduit of visual culture. While the Gallery's own photography collection is still being formed, the inaugural exhibition of the dedicated hall hints at a distinctive direction. Organized in collaboration with the Golden Apricot Film Festival, the show presents a single series of 28 black and white photographs by the legendary master of Iranian cinema, Abbas Kiarostami. Renowned for his hauntingly languid, brilliantly structured films, Kiarostami was also an obsessive photographer, whose long-gestating series on deceptively simple subjects like roads, trees and rain, parallel his cinematic investigations into the essence of nature, human connection and belonging. ' Abbas Kiarostami: Destination Unknown ' presents only the filmmaker's photographs depicting various roads, which he shot while scouring film locations in Iran's provinces. Strikingly beautiful in their graphical sharpness and asceticism, the photographs work best as a sequence of tonal and metaphorical shifts that gradually expands beyond its prosaic subject matter into a transcendental meditation on the sublime power of nature and the infinity of time. The decision to begin the Gallery's photo-exhibition program with a show dedicated to a non-Armenian master from Iran, who was best known for his work in a different art form, suggests a trans-disciplinary, regionally-focused and internationally-orientated strategy. This is essential if the NGA's objective is to position Armenia as an important base for rethinking and reframing the global histories of photography. Exhibition: ' Abbas Kiarostami: Destination Unknown ' Where: National Gallery of Armenia Republic Square, Yerevan Dates: July 15-September 15 MASK: IMAGE AND CONCEPT In a welcome development, transdisciplinary (and transcultural) approaches have also been flickering in the thematic shows organized by the Museum of Russian Art. Their latest show dedicated to the Mask brings the colorful ethnographic still-lifes by sister-painters Mariam and Yeranuhi Aslamazyan together with African ceremonial masks from the collection of the Ethnography Museum of Armenia. The exhibition theme presents a fascinating opportunity to explore the way the 'primitive' mask has been perceived in Armenian visual art—a symbolic device popularized way back in the 1910s by Martiros Saryan—and how it has come to embody our cultural ideas of otherness (especially since Armenians themselves do not have a significant tradition of making or wearing masks). Using the Aslamazyan sisters for this purpose is more than apt: the sisters travelled extensively in Africa and South-East Asia, eventually painting dozens of exuberantly colorful and unabashedly ethno-exotic still-lives that are aesthetically complex echoes of the Soviet imperial ambitions towards the Global South. Judging from the exhibition's promo text, however, the curator and the organizers have no intention in taking a critical or, God forbid, decolonial stance at these issues, focusing instead on the mask as a 'symbol of faith, memory, morality and family values…' This non-committal attitude aside, the show is a rare chance to see these stunning examples of African folk art in Armenia. Exhibition: 'Mask: Image and Concept' Where: Museum of Russian Art 38 Isahakyan St., Yerevan Dates: August 1-September 24 HAO KEPING: MOUNTAINS AND RIVERS OF CHINA Exhibitions focused on distant cultures are a rarity in Armenia. So when not one, but three events simultaneously spotlight contexts far beyond our immediate region, it feels like a subtle shift in the cultural tide—even if some arrive neatly packaged as instruments of soft power from authoritarian states like China. One such exhibition, hosted by the Yerevan History Museum, comes courtesy of the Ningbo Museum—one of the more recent behemoths born of China's museum-building boom. Titled ' Mountains and Rivers of China ', the show is dedicated to the celebrated printmaker Shao Keping and delivers precisely what its name suggests: graceful woodblock prints of China's awe-inspiring natural landscapes, rendered by one of the foremost figures of Chinese socialist-realist art. Born in Ningbo in 1916, Shao Keping rose to prominence soon after the founding of the People's Republic, becoming a key figure in both color printmaking and propaganda poster design. While this exhibition steers clear of the usual imagery of jubilant tractor drivers and heroic coal miners, Keping's idyllic vistas—merging traditional Chinese aesthetics with European realism and Soviet-style neo-classicism—are no less ideologically driven. Rooted in nationalist sentiment and the utopian vision of early Communism, these bucolic landscapes construct a vision of China as a harmonious promised land—conspicuously scrubbed of poverty, labor exploitation, repression, or looming ecological disasters. That absence is precisely what makes the exhibition so compelling: it serves as telling evidence of the nefarious outcomes from the forced union between the arts and the state. Exhibition: ' Mountains and Rivers of China ' Where: Yerevan History Museum 1/1 Argishti St., Yerevan Dates: July 31-September 24 TRADITIONAL HEBEI PAINTING We're going to pretend that this year's surge of Chinese-themed events in Armenia stem purely from a mutual desire to deepen cultural ties. Regardless of the motives, it's a pleasure to encounter the utterly charming art of nianhua (New Year pictures) and nèihuà (inside-painted) bottles from China's historic Hebei province. These forms of traditional folk art remain hugely popular in contemporary China, but visitors to the Martiros Saryan Museum now have the rare opportunity to view precious historical examples on loan from the Hebei Province Museum. The nianhua —essentially early precursors to postcards—are woodblock prints typically depicting deities, symbolic motifs, or zodiac figures associated with the Chinese New Year. Ranging from simple, almost naïve imagery to intricately composed narrative scenes with political and satirical subtexts, these ephemeral prints offer a vivid window into the richness of everyday visual culture in China. Equally captivating are the scented glass bottles painted from the inside with astonishingly fine landscape scenes. Too refined to be dismissed as mere souvenirs, these objects embody the remarkable craftsmanship and attentiveness that reveal much about the specifically Chinese attitudes toward the symbolic importance of objects of material culture and the role of art as a vital means of communication. The choice of the Martiros Saryan Museum as host is particularly fitting. Saryan, the master of Armenian modernist painting, had an enduring fascination with traditional Chinese art, which he also collected. This exhibition may well prompt a long-overdue reassessment of that largely overlooked cultural connection. PERSONAL SPACE: A COLLECTOR'S VIEW Closer to the home front, the Nikoghosyan Foundation is presenting an exhibition featuring works by the so-called 'Bielutin' group of painters from Russia—a loose network of underground artists who challenged the official Soviet art establishment with a scandalous 1962 exhibition at Manezh in Moscow. The group's figurehead, Ely Bielutin founded an independent school and a movement that he termed as 'New Reality'– a conceptually and stylistically hybrid framework inspired by early Soviet avant-garde and the European expressionists. The more talented exponents of the group, like Irina Zakharova, Vladimir Tryamkin and Vera Preobrazhenskaya, were instrumental in cementing the non-conformist scene as the most intellectually and creatively dynamic part of Soviet art. Drawn from the massive collection of late, Moscow-based collector Samvel Hovhannisyan and his wife Karina Kazanjian, the show provides a tantalizing glimpse into the exuberantly experimental milieu of these dissident artists. The exhibition has no scholarly ambitions as it also mixes-in an eclectic range of works by Armenian artists—from famous names like Yervand Kochar and Rudolf Khachatryan to a number of forgotten figures from the 1980s and 1990s. The result is a strange, but captivating potpourri that, first of all, reflects the obsessive drive and broadly-inclusive tastes behind one of the greatest Armenian private art collections ever assembled. THE MANUSCRIPT MYSTERY OF NATURE CREATIVITY Matenadaran's current show presents yet another slice of medieval ecclesiastical visual culture, this time focusing on creationist representations of nature in Armenian manuscripts, complemented by examples of Arabic and Persian illuminated art. That's all well and good, but beyond this broad thematic framework, the exhibition lacks a clear conceptual or critical anchor. It's difficult to gauge, for instance, whether medieval Armenian artists developed distinctly local iconographic, symbolic, or aesthetic modes for depicting the six days of creation and natural phenomena, or whether they simply followed existing regional traditions of ornamentation and illustration. Still, the inclusion of several rarely exhibited manuscripts, intricate silver bindings, and other book-related artifacts showcasing a variety of stylistic approaches offers plenty of visual delight—despite the Institute's unfortunate persistence with musty, cabinet-of-curiosities-style displays. Exhibition: 'The Manuscript Mystery of Nature Creativity' Where: Matenadaran 53 Mashtots Ave., Yerevan Dates: Open from July 2 REFLECTIONS FROM THE MARGINS What's so fun about graduate art exhibitions? Trying to guess who'll be the next big thing, of course—or who most likely won't. Since 2007, the team at Focus NGO's Medialab Centre has been quietly nurturing a new generation of young art practitioners. It's a small but essential alternative education platform where students receive informal training in analogue photography, film and media studies, contemporary art, and—perhaps most crucially—critical thinking. This month, the center presents its latest group of graduates, whose works are organized around the theme of socio-political margins as spaces of resistance. With just seven participants, the exhibition is modest in scale and ambition. Yet the range of critical issues tackled—spanning unchecked urban development to the social stigma surrounding mental illness—offers a sharp and hopeful contrast to the kind of soul-crushing banality too often seen at state art school shows. And that alone is reason enough to support these emerging voices and keep an eye on their future paths. Exhibition: 'Reflections from the Margins' Where: NPAK 1/3 Buzand St., Yerevan Dates: August 8-August 15 PARUYR DAVTYAN. DAVTYAN PARUYR Chances are the name Paruyr Davtyan won't ring a bell for most people in Armenia. But among those in the know, it's linked to one of the most compelling mid-career contemporary artists to emerge from the post-Soviet space. Debuting on the Russian art scene in the early 2010s, the Gyumri-born, transdisciplinary artist quickly established himself as a leading figure within the tradition of Moscow Conceptualism—a politically charged, theory-driven avant-garde movement rooted in early 20th-century Dadaism. Now a fixture on major contemporary art platforms and biennales in Moscow, Davtyan is making his belated debut in his homeland , courtesy of the Cafesjian Centre for the Arts and curator Armen Yesayants. His ironically self-titled solo exhibition offers a clear entry point into his conceptually dense yet surprisingly palatable practice. While the founding figures of Moscow Conceptualism focused on dismantling ideological structures in the late Soviet era, Davtyan is more concerned with interrogating the nature of art itself. Does art possess an innate, immutable identity, or is it a shifting illusion shaped—and reshaped—by socio-historical forces? In exploring these questions, Davtyan's work becomes entirely intertextual and self-reflexive, drawing from and mischievously remixing a vast reservoir of art history that he seems to both gently parody and passionately revere. Although the methods of deconstructive pastiche he employs have become so institutionalized that he appears at times like a classicists of sorts, there's a genuine boldness and vitality in his witty, yet strangely poetic, subversions of canonical works like Monet's Water Lilies or Duchamp's Fountain . Compact but beautifully curated, the exhibition offers a strong overview of Davtyan's practice over the past decade—and is a must-see for anyone interested in the current intellectual trajectories of contemporary visual art. GYUMRI ART WEEK Now in its fourth edition, Gyumri Art Week has firmly established itself as the rightful successor to the short-lived but influential Gyumri Biennale. This month, it returns in full force with an eclectic program that includes contemporary art exhibitions, outdoor installations, performances, music, theater and film screenings. This year's edition centers on ecological and environmental themes, bringing together an intriguing mix of local artists alongside emerging voices from abroad. Special focus is given to Hamlet Hovsepyan and Marcos Grigoryan—two towering figures of Armenian conceptual and land art, whose work called for a more evolved and conscious relationship between nature and artistic practice. Their legacy provides a vital historical anchor, helping to contextualize the depth and ambition of the current generation of artists, many of whom are now confronting the kind of ecological breakdown that even Hovsepyan and Grigoryan could hardly have imagined. Weighty themes aside, Gyumri Art Week also offers a refreshing opportunity to engage with contemporary art outside of the usual Yerevan bubble. Because, the spaces and people through which we typically experience art deeply shape our perception of its meaning and relevance. Attending an event like this in a regional center such as Gyumri can expand—or even transform—your understanding of how art sustains and feeds the social fabric of everyday life. Festival: 'Gyumri Art Week- 4th Edition: Ecology & Environment' Where: Gyumri, Armenia Dates: August 8-August 17 See program DRIVE The summer blockbuster train is in full swing with the expected reboots and franchises like the latest 'Superman', 'Fantastic Four', 'Freaky Friday' and so on. Somewhere in between there will also be a movie with either Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt riding something fast and furious. It's a seemingly endless loop of tautological inanity that wears any semblance of meaning to naught with each, progressively more absurd cycle. So it's a real reprieve to find in the cracks of this grotesque hall of simulacra an authentic piece of film art, even if it was made some 15 years ago. Starring Ryan Gosling—one of the poster-boys of 21st century melancholia for all things analogue—Nicholas Winding Refn's incandescent 2011 thriller ' Drive ' (winner of best director prize at Cannes Film Festival) stands as one of the cinematic high points of the past two decades. A story about an enigmatic stunt driver who gets into a crime job that takes a disastrous turn, 'Drive' is a tense, almost mathematically designed narrative about an aloof loner who temporarily allows emotions to slip through his steely facade. Winding Refn's neon-soaked vision is steeped in nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s, with multiple references to films like 'Taxi Driver', 'The Conversation', 'Diva' and 'Blue Velvet'. But the Dutch director's cinephile obsessions do not prevent him from crafting a universe that is entirely his own—a neo-noir territory where every surface and glance is permeated by a haunting mixture of strangeness, ravishing beauty and lurid violence. It's the kind of flawlessly engineered mechanism that only gets better with age—like the iconic Chevy Impala that Gosling stylishly wheels into cinematic eternity. So, do yourself a favor, buy a ticket and unbuckle your seatbelt for this transcendent experience.
EVN Report
25-07-2025
- EVN Report
Ariga Torosian: High Fashion Made in the Margins
At Qrchi Bazaar, Yerevan's gritty weekend flea market, worn objects tell stories of survival, memory and renewal. Once discarded, these items are repurposed and reborn, offering a glimpse into Armenia's past and present through the chaos of things left behind. Read more Perched on a Yerevan rooftop, the Museum of New Analogies blurs the line between art, architecture, and everyday life—an ephemeral, sound-sensitive space for experimental installations, quiet performances, and surreal encounters high above the city's layered chaos. Read more Armenia's horror subculture is gaining momentum, led by YouTuber-turned-author Ruben Yesayan. His bestselling books, rooted in local myths and unsettling landscapes, are drawing a young fanbase, even as some critics dismiss his sensational, camp-infused style as unserious. Read more Nestled in the outskirts of the southern Armenian town of Kapan, Darmanadzor is a soulful teahouse where Artur Patvakanyan serves hand-foraged herbal blends. Rooted in ancestral wisdom and personal healing, his teas offer comfort, connection and a quiet resistance to modern haste. Read more
