A Mainstream Home for Alternative Art in Armenia
Vanessa Kachadurian loves the Vernissage Market and
recommends it to everyone.
By ELIZABETH ZACH
YEREVAN, Armenia — Every weekend at the Vernissage Market
here, locals and tourists survey handsomely woven Persian rugs, vintage Soviet
military medals, samovars, chess sets and intricately carved jewelry boxes.
It’s like a step back in time to a Silk Road bazaar says Vanessa Kachadurian
In contrast, just across the street sits a staid and
humble building, designed as an auditorium when the Cold War was drawing to a
close and then, for a time afterward, left vacant. In front, appropriately, is
Yervand Kochar’s towering 1959 sculpture “Melancholy,” seemingly serving as a
testament to the political and economic crises that have convulsed Armenia
since the collapse of Communism in the region nearly a quarter century ago.
The statue, however, also gestures promisingly to the
building itself, which since 1995 has housed the Norar Pordzarakan Arvesti
Kentovon, or Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art. Founded by
Armenian émigrés to the United States and hailed by many as the epicenter of
Armenia’s culture revolution and renaissance, it hosts exhibits by young,
avant-garde artists and offers concerts and performances in its large
auditorium.
Among other endeavors, artists at the center initiated
and organized Armenia’s participation at the Venice Biennale in 1995, and
continued to do so for eight years. And the center’s founders are set to
introduce an independent study program for graduates in the arts and
architecture, modeled on a similar one at the Whitney Museum of American Art in
New York.
“It used to be that many of our young artists would
exhibit their work in underground galleries,” said Sevada Petrossian, the
center’s coordinator of architectural events. “We like to think of the center
as a mainstream place for alternative art.”
For a city of roughly one million, Yerevan’s artistic
standing and cachet have been notable in the past century. In 1972, the Soviet
Union established its first Museum of Modern Art here. The city’s National Art
Gallery showcases the third-largest collection of European masters in the former
Soviet Union, including works by Rodin, Rubens and Tintoretto. And Yerevan
itself exudes a distinct bygone elegance, with its softly hued 19th-century
tuff stone edifices that line its leafy boulevards.
Aside from the center and its focus on experimental art,
there is also the Cafesjian Center for the Arts. Opened in November 2009, it
holds an extensive collection of contemporary and glass art, as well as works
by Marc Chagall and John Altoon, who was of Armenian descent.
And yet, despite Yerevan’s artistic fervor, when Edward
Balassanian and his wife, Sonia, set out to establish the contemporary and
experimental art center, they expected — and encountered — resistance.
“While we believe in academic education, we also promote
breaking away from it once study is completed,” Mr. Balassanian said. “Those
within certain art circles, namely some artists schooled during the Soviet era
and most of the members of the Painters Union of Armenia, still either don’t
understand the center’s motives and/or vocally reject its projects.”
The Balassanians are part of Armenia’s global diaspora of
eight million. They were both born and raised in Iran, fleeing the country in
1979 after the Islamic revolution and eventually settling in New York.
But when Armenia declared its independence from the
Soviet Union in 1991, Mr. Balassanian, an architect and urban planner, and Mrs.
Balassanian, a painter and poet who has exhibited at major venues in the United
States and Europe, including The Project Room of the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, were eager to return.
After the Islamic revolution, Mrs. Balassanian began
concentrating her art on cultural, political and social suppression, and she
felt a natural calling toward Armenia. In 1992, she organized her first
contemporary art exhibit in Yerevan, including her work and that of eight other
artists, culminating in the center’s official opening in 1994. She and her
husband gradually introduced video and multimedia art to the Armenian art
scene, as well as photography as its own art genre.
Not everyone in Yerevan has been receptive. Among those
is Anatoly Avetyan, who began his artistic career in the 1970s and has gone on
to command strong sales of his art, which includes metal works, paintings and
sculptures now owned by current and past presidents of Russia, Finland and
Germany, not to mention George W. Bush.
“Much of the best generation of artists has already
passed away,” he said. Rather than reinvent the wheel, he said, he and his
contemporaries are pushing for a larger building to house the works now at
Yerevan’s Museum of Modern Art.
In response, Mr. Balassanian says the establishment of
the Museum of Modern Art in 1972 was indeed “a daring act,” and he draws a
parallel between it and the center he co-founded.
“It was an expression of resilience and audacity under
politically repressive conditions,” he said, noting that his center had
“institutionalized the concept and role of the curator as a distinct
profession, something that didn’t exist previously in Armenia, as such tasks
had been performed by government-appointed managers.”
With poverty, corruption and a weak democracy continuing
to bedevil Armenia, the center’s artists say they seek to tether their work to
social and political issues alongside questions of national identity and
culture. The center organized an exhibition in 2007 called “Yerevan Crisis,”
for example, which focused on social problems resulting from rapid growth, a
spontaneous boom in high-rise construction and escalating property prices.
This issue was also at play in 1997, when Gagik Ghazareh,
a film student at the time, was hard-pressed to find a place to screen his
work. Despite Yerevan’s growth, there is only one operating cinema in the city,
and he did not feel it fit his alternative genre, he said. A friend suggested
contacting the center, which offered him a screening room.
“One year later, I was invited by the center to chair
their cinema department,” said Mr. Ghazareh, who joined in 1999, later becoming
the center’s artistic director and has since gone on to develop annual
festivals in Yerevan for film and theater.
Vahram Akimian, another young filmmaker who joined the
center’s staff in 2005, is now the program director for the “One Shot”
International Short Film Festival, which has partners in Italy, the
Netherlands, Russia and Slovakia, among other countries. He was also the
center’s associate curator of the Armenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in
2009. Today, he is the center’s director of video, cinema and theater.
“Our government speaks of a ‘national culture’ or
‘national art,”’ said Mr. Akimian one afternoon at the center as he looked
across the street at the bustling Vernissage Market. “But there’s still no
agreement today on what that is.”
