It should be noted, however, that the exhibition, in general, suggests a desire to move away from the digital realm, while also thinking about ways to balance the online experience as a constructive rather than destructive aspect of our lives. Turning the virtual into a medium for art appears to be one of the best ways to achieve this balance.
One of the more striking aspects of the exhibition is the way it brought together a diversity of mediums – from ceramics to video and interactive performances. This variety can be seen as a metaphor for the multitude of viewpoints that are quickly emerging in post-war Armenia. Hence, the even coexistence of parallel realities offered by the individual artists becomes the key proposal of this show. Regardless of size or type, none of the works try to make grand statements that would overwhelm their neighbors. Rather, the assembly works because each artwork appears to complement one another.
In her deeply personal piece We Are All Tired, the artist Valentina Maz chose to express the collective anxieties about the present by embroidering her feelings on a long piece of fabric. Maz, an Egyptian-Armenian living in Yerevan, turns the time-consuming process of embroidery into a globally-relevant statement about the pain of the interminable wait for a better future. As she claims in her artist text, “humanity is tired physically, emotionally and mentally... Everything has been multiplied and has become too much to handle, leaving humans as victims of larger forces than themselves. I see humanity as nothing more than an army of broken hearts and aching souls, desperately searching for fulfilment.”
Maz elaborated that the text appearing on her eight-meter long embroidery reflects the exhaustion and the confusion of ordinary individuals from the relentless barrage of global crises. Stretching time, the laborious practice behind this artwork was perhaps a way of coming to terms with new realities and offering a fragile hope in the power of art to heal and help us make sense of the chaos.
Another artist, Lusine Talalyan, attempted to critically reimagine Yerevan's architecture by pulling apart, defragmenting and feminizing its phallic, masculine traits in her digital drawings. Using soft organic lines, pink and green pastel tones, Talalyan searches for ways to defamiliarize ubiquitous architectural spaces and unlock a sense of freedom by queering the patriarchal infrastructures and the mercantile rhetoric of 21st century urban development. In the words of the artist, her digital prints want to "bring the inner side out and to change the landscapes of the city by adding to the facades of the houses such [interior] elements like wallpaper. It is also about the voyeuristic feeling that everybody could have by looking to the windows and guessing who is living there and what kinds of lives they have.” Hence, Talalyan brings forth an oppositional perspective and makes way for the construction of a new future by taking “chaos” as a productive starting point.
Milena Adamyan's photo-collage, How to Be, is another work in the exhibition that echoes this feminist intention. Adamyan's self-portraits show herself surrounded by irreverent texts that call the viewer to rebel against societal expectations of how to be a “proper” woman.
The disparate voices and visions of these artworks offer an image of a post-crisis reality, where highly individual experiences are fostered and allowed to entangle with one another, because the future that they imagine is much more dynamic, open-ended and not fixed in any concrete or dominant ideology. What unites them is the sense of common purpose indicated by the title of the show – the importance of listening to one another and the vital need to keep imagining better ways of being together.
The necessity of having shared, democratic and physical spaces outside of the digital domain where unexpected encounters (with art and people) could happen and critical dialogues can flourish is perhaps the most tangible proposition of this exhibition. It seems to indicate that local contemporary art is, finally, letting go of its reluctance to contemplate the future. At the very least, it is reassuring to see these works as an invitation to collectively meditate and propose new ways of dealing with our fragile grip on reality.
