Epress.am News from Armenia
In Yerevan, the concentration of bank ads is as high as in Frankfurt, London and New York combined, and more and more exclusive buildings are making themselves at home there. Many of the newly built structures remain empty, but that’s not stopping developers, writes Aya Bach in Deutsche Welle.
But then, just where one least expects it, there’s a bit of art in Yerevan — in a cultural center called Suburb, a private initiative by artists and curators. Eva Khachatryan is among them; she has organized a three-day meeting there with colleagues from Armenia, Georgia and Germany. The workshop is part of a program developed by Germany’s Goethe-Institut and supported by cultural managers from throughout eastern Europe and central Asia.
The goal is to create networks in an industry that is by definition border-crossing.
“It’s important to have an international scene here,” stressed Khachatryan. “We have a young generation of artists that are hungry for any information about contemporary art.”
But access to the thriving art world is lacking in Armenia, given that the education system is still rooted in old Soviet structures. Those who want to learn about contemporary artists and their work have to rely on private initiatives organized by artists, critics and curators, often with little financial backing.
The state of art education offers material for the workshop in Suburb. Most of the creative initiatives that came about during the optimism of the post-Soviet period now face major financial problems, or have since disappeared completely. Turning to the state for help leads nowhere, but perhaps that’s not such a bad thing.
Armenian curator Susanna Gyulamiryan sees good reasons to keep some distance from the government. “Even though there is now opposition and artistic streams that run completely counter to traditional institutions, we still bear much of the Soviet past with us,” she said.
The official understanding of art, she added, is still very bound up with state interests, and dissenting positions don’t have much of a place.
Practically the entire art scene sees itself in the role of political opposition. As such, alternatives to institutions sponsored by the Armenian government are welcome, and creative networks with other countries offer just what many artists are looking for.
The group in Suburb aims to address those interests by establishing a cooperation with Germany. The Goethe-Institut program in which Eva Khachatryan participates includes a residency in Berlin.
Many of Armenia’s artists share a sensibility with Berlin, from the city’s street art to its internationally acclaimed galleries. In one courtyard at Suburb, an artist duo exhibits a bourgeois kitchen and musty old bedroom. The installation plays with traditional ideas about gender and sexuality.
The group has a number of concrete plans and ideas, including creating an archive for contemporary art and an accompanying library in Yerevan — a means of combating the dramatic lack of information in the city. Eva Khachatryan has had the idea in mind for years, but now it can finally be realized with help from Berlin.
“We could organize it together with the [Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (New Society for Visual Arts)]. There’s also a bookstore next door — perhaps they could help us as well,” she said.
Khachatryan also hopes to take a further step. Despite her concerns, she has decided to seek support for the initiative from the Ministry of Culture, as promised by the representative who attended her workshop.
“I don’t know if we can build up the civil society in our country with such a seminar,” she reflected after the three-day event. “But we’ve been working for at least 10 years — and we’re fighting exactly for that! We’re not going to leave our country because we want to improve it. This project is a major source of help for us because we believe that we can do something meaningful through it.”