Exhibition/sale made by hand of a great young person Nvard Yerkanyan and her friends, Made in Hand went on for three days starting 25 December in AJZ space on Sayat-Nova street. It featured all kinds of handmade little earrings toys, scarves, and other items. Here are some photographs from this exhibition.
There’s a small bakery in central Yerevan, behind Avantgarde Folk Club. Went in there tonight to get some bread but they didn’t have any ready. They said they’d have it around 1 am. But when they do, it’s great hot bread. Great place and great people. One of the bakers said he learned baking from a 16-year-old boy who came from Gyumri.
Great place.
Someone told me several days ago that two years have passed since Serzh Sargysan, then prime minister, said that in two years time the issue with homeless people in Gyumri will be resolved.
I spent the last several days in Gyumri visiting once again the homeless people living in domiks (self-built structures). There was almost no change compared to last year.
There are still nearly 6,000 families living in domiks, according to a research done by Gyumri’s Third Nature NGO. Together with this organization we will exhibit some photos, including these, in December 2009.
Armenian Revolutionary Federation Dashnaktsutyun marched and rallied today in protest of protocols that Armenian and Turkish foreign ministers are planning to sign tomorrow. According to different sources, something like 20-30,000 people gathered for the march.
The party members, who have been protesting for nearly a month, consider the protocols to be against national interests. Here are some photographs from the event.
Fall in Yerevan is always full with cultural events. This October was no exception and rich with a variety of activities. HIGH FEST, the international performing arts festival finished just yesterday. There is no doubt that the fest was a unique event for the country with performances in theater, dance and music genres. Although I do appreciate what I would call “classic” genres most of the value of the Fest for me is in the production styles which are either simply neglected or not yet very popular in Armenia such as street performances, circus, mime, puppet/marionette. I was happy to notice that this year’s FEST had plenty of that and even a fire show! It was something! Despite the fact that the show was eco-unfriendly 
The contemporary art festival, Fest i Nova, recently hosted the Human Emotion Project (HEP) presented by Georgian artist Irina Gabiani.
Fest i Nova is a newly launched contemporary art event, held from Aug. 5 to Oct. 25, in the Garikula art villa in the Shida Kartli region. Karaman Kutateladze, founder of the festival, and the Shida Kartli Cultural Heritage Foundation, own the art villa.
“I wanted to turn the house into a contemporary art gallery and I suppose I have reached my goal,” Kutateladze said.
The festival also hosts artists from Austria, France, Netherlands, Georgia and the U.S.
“The artists are invited to realize individual projects in the framework of the project. The goal is to create a specific platform to facilitate the exchange of artistic views and stimulate different practices of contemporary art,” reads the summary of the Fest i Nova project.
Gabiani is a Georgian artist living and working in Luxemburg. After studying at the Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, she continued her study at the Amsterdam Gerrit Rietveld Academy. Her major field of interest is human emotions.
Together with her individual works she is involved in a variety of international projects, and the HEP is one of them. The HEP Georgian presentation was held by Gabiani in Garikula.
The HEP, a collection of video art, was created by Alison Williams, a contemporary South African artist.
“HEP 2009 was born out of a voyeuristic need to observe how other artists express themselves on an emotional level and to see the effectiveness of that in a social context via physical exhibitions and an online interaction,” she writes in the project summary.
Collaborating artists found each other on the Art Review Magazine’s Web site in early 2009. Since then the project has been screened in several countries, including Australia, Spain, Portugal, Italy and now Georgia.
Two and three minute films of different foreign artists displayed a big disparity of emotions.
Irina Gabiani has placed two of her films in the project, “The Slaves of the System” and “Samaia or Triamazikamno.”
“Samaia” depicts the moods of an ordinary person: sadness, anger and joy. According to the artist, none of these moods are stable and positive. They turn on each other rapidly and do not give the protagonist a chance to live sensibly.
“You feel in harmony only when you stand apart from all these moods, only in this case do you feel calm and comfortable inside,” the artist said. The three emotions are symbolic and cover many other varieties of moods that a human being has, she added.
Gabiani who usually only employs two shades – black and white – assumes that there are three energies in the universe – positive, negative and neutral. She became interested in the “essence of life” and indulged in physics. Science gave her a solid basis for her view of life. Electron as minus, proton as plus and neutron as neutralizing are the essences of the universe, she ponders.
Although people perceive things to be either black or white, Gabiani said, she on the other hand likes to be an impartial observer.
Gabiani tries to bring up things from everyday life in her work to make people perceive themselves as a whole, as part of the universe instead of being involved in the insensate triviality of life.
“So many things are happening around us, that we even cannot think about and the world is so complex that if we realize it, we would look at the events and facts around us in a completely different way,” she said.
Her later works, done also in black and white, depict atoms, micro and macro elements. She attempts to show the viewer the whole notion of the world around us, often leaving behind our minds.
Anna Chichinadze
18.09.2009
Yerevan International Animation Film Festival ReAnimania will take place in Yerevan on 3-6 October. The event includes a competition, workshops, screenings, as well as very interesting premiers.
One of the greatest Armenian animators, who was also a member of the honorary council of this festival, Robert Sahakyants passed away on 24th Sept.
Here is one of his movies. Hopefully Armenian animation will Re-develop to have the beauty it had before.
An almost hidden an unadvertised exhibition of one of the most interesting artists in Armenia is taking place now in Yerevan. These kind of things always leave me thinking whether alternative art the way it is in Armenia should remain where it is. And fortunately the alternative and the underground always exists.
So who exists now is Vahram Muradyan. Vahram paints, makes illustrations, makes music, all that is on his website. There isn’t much to say about this artist, and one should just take a look at his work on the website to realize. The CD he has lately made is very nice, mostly made out of sounds from every day life.
As for the exhibition, each piece is a print of notebook pages, and it is situated in an apartment his friends are renting for a studio.
Photos by Nvard Yerkanyan
One of the greatest issues we sometimes have is finding what after all we should be doing in this life. The person I listened to the other day has found it.
Pianist Tigran Hamasyan is just out of this world. And he is also completely in here. He plays jazz and Armenian music, and also music just in itself that cannot really be classified.
Right now Tigran is in Yerevan for several days, his concerts are already over, and I was lucky to take some shots of him in everyday life. In his everyday life or on stage he is music. Right now that he is 22, he filled all the halls he played in, whether in clubs or on bigger stages.
Here is Tigran on myspace, and his website is www.tigranhamasyan.com.
“Once in the bus they asked me if I was the one talking on the Underground show. I said ‘yes’, and they took me off the bus”… She doesn’t take it seriously of course. Moreover, she seems to almost like it because there is no one else to whom they would say that.
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