Tag: IN SITU

Interview: Tigran Amiryan

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Tigran Amiryan is an independent curator and contemporary culture researcher with a Ph.D in Literary Studies. He is our featured artists this week on the HAYP/IN SITU “Virtual Viewing Room” platform, a space for online artworks from June 1 – August 2, 2020. In this interview, we learn a little more about his auto-narrative sketch “Skin Crisis”, and his philosophy on the marriage of science, literature and creative practice. Scroll down to the very bottom for a complete bio.

Tigran Amiryan, photo retrieved from Chai Khana

HAYP/ IN SITU: Tell us about your VVR project “Skin Crisis”, where did the idea come from? 

Tigran Amiryan: For many years I have been dealing with memory and recollection. It is of great interest to me how memory is formed and destroyed – whether individual or collective memory- how it transforms, how individual and group memory is formed, how amnesia occurs, and so on. Skin memory and human-reality relationships / boundaries continue to remain my focus. 

FIRDUS: THE MEMORY OF A PLACE by Tigran Amiryan. This memory-book is about the Firdusi street, the last vernacular district in the center of Yerevan. In addition to research articles, the book includes stories of local residents and family photo archives.
Tigran at his book signing of “Firdus: Memory of a place”

HI: Could you expand in particular on the idea of a text as an artwork?

TA: The topic of memory does not belong to one discipline or one language. Often this phenomenon, being multifaceted and multi-layered, requires researchers to use different languages ​​and methods. There are two scripts that are familiar to me, the mix of which allows for a more complete expression: literature and scientific language. With “Skin Crisis” I decided to push the boundaries between these two languages, as a means to remove the boundaries between our bodies during the last difficult months [of quarantine].

HI: How does this relate to your research and artistic practice?

TA: I develop my academic and creative practice in parallel. For example, I teach French literature, semiotics, etc., and at the same time, I’ve developed a number of projects in which I combine anthropological and literary approaches, concepts and artistic expression.

“Memory Square”, an essay on the memory of place by Tigran Amiryan.

HI: Who/what inspires you?

TA: I incorporated different concepts into “Skin Crisis” that refer to various ideas by Didier Anzieu, Julia Kristeva, and Gilles Deleuze. It’s well known that Anzieu was engaged not only in psychoanalysis, but also in literature, through which he tried to understand the basics of self-analysis. Kristeva also works constantly between the two disciplines, creating both fictional and philosophical and psychoanalytical texts. As for Deleuze, he always claims that all philosophies and scientific works carry an important creative engine, without which it is impossible to create a philosophical or meta-language.

HI: What does confinement mean to you? Have you (re)discovered something during this time?

TA: Isolation is a new attempt to perceive space.

HI: When you’re not writing or researching, what do you enjoy the most?

TA: The sea.

“Atlantic” series. Photo credit Tigran Amiryan, courtesy of the artist.

HI: If you had a magic wand, and could change one thing about the art scene in Armenia, what would it be?

TA: In Armenia and everywhere, we need to get rid of cultural tribalism. More democratic and transparent art!

HI: What is your dream project that you haven’t had a chance to work on yet?

TA: All my projects start with dreams and seem to come true. I don’t dream much, I have already started working on my next project which involves photography and memory.

“Сimetière des fontaines” (Fountain Cemetary) by Tigran Amiryan.

About Tigran Amiryan:
Visit Tigran’s Virtual Viewing Room project, “Skin Crisis” here.
Follow him on instagram at @l_oriental
Find him on behance

Tigran Amiryan is a Professor of Contemporary World Literature, co-founder and president of CSN lab. He is a semiologist, literary critic, curator, contemporary culture researcher and multidisciplinary artist. Author of numerous articles on postmodern genres of literature, interdisciplinary analysis, contemporary comparative analytics, sociology of literature, etc. Tigran’s main interest revolves around the issue of narrativization of both individual and collective memory in contemporary culture, artistic (fictional) representation and history of the Self, biographies, urban space and environment that keep the memory of people’s lives despite being constantly subjected to oblivion and destruction. Tigran realized a number of art and research projects across several countries, Armenia, Georgia, France, Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, Morocco etc. Amongst his projects are “Memory square” (Kazakhstan), “Kukia Alphabet” (Georgia), “Firdus: The Memory of a Place” (Armenia), «Cyprus archive. Postcard from the land of care» (Cyprus).

Interview: Kima & Nareh

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Kima Gyarakyan and Nareh Petrossian are visual artists currently living and working in Armenia. They are our featured artists this week on the HAYP/IN SITU “Virtual Viewing Room” platform, a space for online artworks from June 1 – August 2, 2020. In this interview, we learn a little more about their project “Loveless” and their philosophy as an artistic duo. Scroll down to the very bottom for a complete bio.

HAYP/ IN SITU: Tell us about your VVR project, “Loveless”.

KIMA GYARAKYAN + NAREH PETROSSIAN: “Loveless” is about the repetition of images as a metaphor for a similarity of days. What does repetition give us, or why do we repeat the same actions and deeds? Through our composition, we have tried to represent the human feelings, words, actions and repetition of thoughts in everyday life.

“Armenian Pattern” by Kima Gyarakyan, marker on canvas, 100 x 85 cm, 2019.
Detail from “Armenian Pattern”.
Nareh Petrossian, “սերսերսերսերսեր” (“SerSerSerSer”, or lovelovelovelove) posted to @Hayp_pop_up during her instagram takeover of our platform.

HI: How does this relate to your artistic practice? Can you tell us more about your collaboration as an artistic duo?

KG/NP: Nare + Kima = a work of art. 

We have been thinking and talking about art and works of art together for a long time. We complement each other. By collaborating, we put aside our sense of self, authorship or concerns for copyright, we ignore our own ego. We create art that belongs to everyone.

Kima’s reflection held up by Nareh. Photo courtesy of Kima Gyarakyan.
Love series by Nareh Petrossian. Acrylic and graphite on paper.

HI: Who/what inspires you?

KG/NP: Everything and nothing.

HI: What does confinement mean to you? Have you (re)discovered something during this time?

KG/NP: During confinement, we were able to understand and appreciate things we hadn’t noticed before, or took for granted. We became aware of how fear can be a limitation for us. And in order not to limit ourselves, we try to transform those fears into art.

HI: When you’re not making art, what do you enjoy the most?

KG/NP: Everything we do is somehow linked to our art. Even if we’re not making art, the feelings we experience – the pleasures, the good, the bad..these things we live – always lead us back to art and the creative process. 

HI: If you had a magic wand, and could change one thing about the art scene in Armenia, what would it be?

KG/NP: Everything is right even when it’s wrong. Art will change as long as we change.

HI: What is your dream project that you haven’t had a chance to work on yet?

KG/NP: Of course we have projects that we haven’t implemented yet. But it’s too soon to share…any thought or project can be realized only when the desire and the moment mature. But one thing we’re interested in doing more of for sure is bringing art out into the public space, in the streets.

«ստեղ չի» (not here). Public Happening by Kima & Nareh on Saryan St., Yerevan.
Kima Gyarakyan, site-specific installation curated by HAYP Pop Up Gallery for URVAKAN Festival 2019. Note, the installation was painted over by public officials for its “inappropriate content”. Photocredit: Anna Mkrtchyan.
Detail of Kima Gyarakyan, site-specific installation. Photocredit: Anna Mkrtchyan.

About Nareh Petrossian and Kima Gyarakyan:
Visit Nareh & Kima’s Virtual Viewing Room project, “loveless” until June 21, 2020.
Follow them on instagram @nareh.petrossian, and @kimagyarakyan

Kima and Nareh are emerging contemporary artists who are “inspired by everything and nothing,” as they put it. They have a shared interest in exploring themes from everyday life, and are particularly inspired by how its repetitive nature serves as a catalyst for introspection. Though they’ve studied together since high school at the Terlemezyan Art College, and again later at the Fine Arts Academy of Yerevan, their partnership as an artistic duo began recently over the past few months. They believe that in order to make art that belongs to everyone, it’s important to be able to put aside the ego. For them, collaboration is an essential part of this process. 

Kima’s works are a reflection of her inner world: her emotional state and feelings. Above all she values the process of making art: finding harmony and a sense of unity while “in the flow”, a state that she also describes as a “blankness” in which she loses herself. Kima has had several solo exhibitions at Dalan Art Gallery, Visual Gap Gallery, and Terlemezyan Gallery. She had a joint exhibition with @Yerevantropics curated by IN SITU in the framework of the 2019 Armenia Art Fair. 

Nareh’s work revolves around abstract and universal themes. She is interested in color, volume, and how to incorporate playfulness in her compositions. Most recently, her work has focused on love. Her practice synthesizes the universal and the specific, in hopes of making her work relatable and engaging to audiences. Nareh has participated in several exhibitions at the Terlemezyan Gallery, the Hovhannes Tumanyan Museum, as well as the 2019 Urban Art Festival by Visual Gap Gallery and the Goethe-Centre Yerevan.

Interview: Gohar Martirosyan

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Gohar Martirosyan is a conceptual and performance artist currently living and working in Armenia. She is our featured artist this week on the HAYP/IN SITU “Virtual Viewing Room” platform, a space for online artworks from June 1 – August 2, 2020. In this interview, we learn a little more about Gohar’s project and what inspires her as an artist. Scroll down to the very bottom for a complete bio.

HAYP/ IN SITU: Tell us about your VVR project, “Presence”.

Gohar Martirosyan: My research started from communication: what is really missing in our communication and how to improve it. It’s well known that we are living in an age of over consumption of information, and we live our lives jumping from one event to another. It’s how we try to blur our inner suffering, and events become our behavior. We get more and more individualistic and isolated and we translate our communication via a language of ego sublimation. 

Related to that, [my work] questions how a physical dimension is necessary to create healthy communication. It’s in part related to the Corona Virus, but I think we were in the same state even before. I’m talking about the body, and trying to see if it can be a solution or not. It’s mostly an open question: do we need to share presence or consciousness?

“Negative Traces”, clay body traces produced while in confinement and exhibited in the project, “Presence”, for Virtual Viewing Room.

Monsters, a series of digital drawings on analogue photographs taken of the city of Gyumri, empty in the wake of confinement.

HI: How does this relate to your artistic practice?

GM: My artistic approach is to talk about common issues via my personal experience. I think it’s the only way to talk about something from a hidden point of view, and to reveal the abandoned side of the conflict. I think that we are a product of social and common memory. We are created for sure by our societies. So each of us is a module of society, which is why I take myself as a product of experiment. First of all, I practice on my own self. 

HI: What do you mean by abandoned side of a conflict?

GM: I’m inspired by inner conflict and external conflict. I’m looking for the side that is missing, and I try to bring it out via my practice to show a more complete picture. That’s what inspires me.

“Criminal Case: Love”, an installation in which Gohar analyzes the end of her relationship through objects that were gifted to her by her ex-boyfriend. Gohar looks at love as a criminal act, and in particular the death of her ego in the framework of a patriarchal society.

HI: What does confinement mean to you? Have you (re)discovered something during this time?

I discovered that we should invent new media to communicate with one another, and I think that in some way it’s the mission of art as well. For example, when we remove vision, like if we cannot see each other, we replace it with imagination. And our imagination becomes stronger in order to compensate [for lack of sight]. I think we become more sensitive to each other and somehow the distance makes us see more clearly. I don’t want to call it Telepathy, but it’s something where we enter a new dimension and we explore it, and we’ve all became explorers. That’s what I really appreciate during this time.

HI: When you’re not making art, what do you enjoy the most?

GM: What do I enjoy the most….? Hmm…actually, I think that for each person, to work on what he really likes – what makes him happy or what is pleasant for him – that is the really hard work. And I think we should reveal for each of us what we really want from this life. That’s what I enjoy doing. I love to discover what can make me satisfied, and I like the idea of purification, because when we’re overloaded with memory and information I think we should sometimes get rid of it and open up new space inside of us. I’m thinking of these practices – how to open the space, make room – for new information. That’s what really makes me feel good.

“Dragon” was a performative installation that took place on the Rhine in Dusseldorf, Germany. The performance looks at the illusionary shape of freedom, like a kite flying in the air but controlled by a thread held in someone’s hand.

HI: If you had a magic wand, and could change one thing about the art scene in Armenia, what would it be?

I don’t see myself as a critic, but rather a solution finder. I wouldn’t change anything because everything that exists, exists as it is in the right time and in the right space dimension…but…during our gatherings for our new platform, “Antibodies”, we are discovering that the Armenian art scene is separated into groups. In Armenian dialect we call it “Taifaz”. Those groups feel stronger together, there is some common practice inside of it that I really love, because you feel more protected when you are inside of a community, but I think that we shouldn’t be so insecure, and we should become more open to communicate and more confident to engage each other. So yes I would like to find a map connection between groups and blur these borders between us.

HI: What is your dream project that you haven’t had a chance to work on yet?

I’m really thinking about how to invest in a new medium of communication. I’m really thinking about a digital project that would be a platform where we can exchange, propose [ideas], and get what we need. It could be for a social project, or an art project…A truly collaborative platform. Another thing I think about is how Art has the power to solve huge issues, including political issues. I’m thinking currently about the mount Amulsar, and I would like to develop some interactive performance that would integrate art in a non-artistic site. I’m really experimenting with this idea.  

About Gohar Martirosyan:
Visit Gohar’s Virtual Viewing Room project, “Presence” until June 14, 2020.
Follow her on instagram @goharmartirosian
See her graphic design work on behance

Gohar Martirosyan lives and works in Armenia. She was born in Gyumri and grew up in Eastern Europe between Poland and Belarus. She studied at the Academies of Fine Arts of Krakow (Poland) and Yerevan (Armenia), and has presented her work in galleries, museums and exhibitions across Europe and the Middle East including the STANDART Armenian Art Triennale (2017), Gallery 25 (Gyumri), DEPO gallery (Istanbul), Weltkunstzimmer (Dusseldorf), Future2 Gallery (Vienna), and Gallery Dela (Tehran) among others.
Trained as a painter, Gohar has been making multimedia installations since 2015 including plastic works, light installations, and site specific and performative installation. Her artistic research addresses the fragile and opaque area where the public and intimate parts of our lives clash and merge. This work often takes her to open-air and natural spaces of cultural and historic significance, like Mount Aragats in Armenia, the Juist Island in the Northern sea, the Mush district in Gyumri, or the breach on the Rhine river in Dusseldorf.

Gohar works with symbols, archetypes, artifacts, spaces and artistic gesture as vehicles for exploring the human experience. She is particularly interested in the co-existence of modern and ancient life, where humans build themselves inside of history. Her practice is a continuous poetic questioning of social norms, and the limitations of individualistic societies’ “cult of separation”. Gohar’s overall goal is to create emotional mind-body experiences that explore who we are – personally and socially – as a means to help collective and collaborative cultures emerge.

Interview: Samvel Saghatelian

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Samvel Saghatelian is a multi-disciplinary artist currently living and working in Armenia. He is our featured artist this week on the HAYP/IN SITU “Virtual Viewing Room” platform, a space for online artworks from June 1 – August 2, 2020. In this interview, we learn a little more about Samvel’s project and what makes him “tick” as an artist. Scroll down to the very bottom for a complete bio.

Samvel Saghatelian, Photo credits: Anush Kocharyan.

HAYP/IN SITU: Tell us about your Virtual Viewing Room (VVR) project.

SAMVEL SAGHATELIAN: “My VVR project addresses the drastic socio-political changes in human confrontation. The project is based on the “Metamorphosis” series, which dates back to the great changes and upheavals of the 90s: the collapse of the Soviet Union, [Armenian] Independence, war, and post-war reality. At the center of it all is woman, and in particular, the female body. She is more flexible and adaptable to different situations. A woman’s body is able to undergo change, no matter what context. I see the female form as a symbol that transcends and goes beyond gender to become a universal symbol for bodily transformation or metamorphosis. For me, beauty is genderless. But this specific bodily power, of flexibility, is definitely feminine.”

HI: How does this project relate to your artistic practice?

SAM SAGA: The series is as connected to my practice as it is to the revolutionary events of 2018. We experienced a liberation of ourselves and our bodies; an expansion in our identity that was more complete, united and self-sufficient. We became a fully flourishing body.
Before the revolution we were divided, not only as a nation but within ourselves. Blossoming happens when you find that unity within yourself. You don’t need to look for answers elsewhere- it’s in you. Once you have that, nothing can stop you. Not even a viral epidemic, just as the cholera epidemic did not prevent the “body” of the Italian Renaissance from flourishing.

  • “Blossoming in the time of Corona”, 2020. Acrylic on canvas, 165x105cm
  • “Body: Metamorphosis”, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 162 x103cm

HI: Who/what inspires you?

SAM SAGA: Everything related to man-nature, man-universe, man-man, man-society, man-politics, and of course, love and sex…

HI: What does confinement mean to you? Have you (re)discovered something during this time?

SAM SAGA: Restrictions, pressures, traumas, illnesses, viruses, and everything that creates limits ultimately encourages new creative horizons. For me, regarding the Corona situation in particular, two important issues came up. A need for a connection with nature, and an awareness of a crisis of humanism. I’ve found in this a chance to be redefined, reborn and recreated.

 “Metamorphosis: Floating bodies of lovers ”, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 157x190cm

HI: When you’re not making art, what do you enjoy the most?

SAM SAGA: It depends if you’re in art or not. If you’re in it, then the creative process is continuous, even if you’re not actually making something in that moment. I enjoy watching movies, sex, exercising in the woods among the trees, conversations with different people, being with my family and kids…

HI: If you had a magic wand, and could change one thing about the art scene in Armenia, what would it be?

SAM SAGA: I would make it so that law and enterprise would promote art as a priority in state policy. Art is politics and politics is art.

HI: What is your dream project that you haven’t had a chance to work on yet?

SAM SAGA: There are many! “Karahunj” is a public art concept and multimedia sculptural project that I would love to implement in Yerevan or, for example, in Los Angeles. Also related to public art is a concept series called “Architectural Monsters” that I would like to implement as real architectural buildings in Armenia, the USA and Dubai, but also on the planet Mars. I also could imagine making great mural art projects with these latest flowering figures [Metamorphosis series], or turn them into land art. Also on my dream list: I would love a private exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery.

Architectural Monsters

About Samvel:
Visit Samvel’s Virtual Viewing Room project, “Metamorphosis” until June 7, 2020.
See more of his art at Samsaga.com

Samvel is an architect by training, and his three-dimensional approach shines through in his paintings, collages, and site-specific installations. His work often revolves around the body politic, and in particular, the female body as an allegory for society’s conflicts, struggles, as well as beauty and generative potential. Samvel’s career as an artist started in 1988 at the brink of the collapse of the USSR and Armenia’s Independence. A part of the 90s avant-garde in Yerevan, Samvel’s early work touched upon national survival, patriotism and ideologies dealing with the individual’s place in society. After moving to the US in 2002, Samvel was an active member of the LA artist community, exhibiting at the Garboushian Gallery, Mouradian Gallery, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Avenue 50 Studio, Black Maria Gallery, and the Bruce Lurie Gallery among others. As of 2014, he has been living and working in Yerevan, inspired anew by the country’s political and societal shifts, and blossoming, outspoken youth. His recent works include “Transromance”, a bawdy and sarcastic collage series exploring the body, desire, and power relations; “Borderline Reality”, a collaborative project with inmates at various penitentiaries in Armenia; “Personal & Political Protest Signs”, an explicit typographic series; and “Homo-communication: The Hole” sketches, drawings, and sculptures exploring man in the universe and the universe in man. Samvel’s VVR project is part of “Metamorphosis”, a primitivist series that muses on man’s return to nature.

Virtual Viewing Room is made possible thanks to the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.