Dr. Angela Harutyunyan is a professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2011-2023 she taught at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon where she also led the art history program. She is one of the founding editors of ARTMargins published by MIT Press. She has edited several volumes, published book chapters and contributed articles on post-Soviet art and culture, Marxist aesthetics, historical temporality and curatorial theory. Her monograph The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-garde: The Journey of the ‘Painterly Real’ was published by Manchester University Press in 2017. She is a founding member of The Ashot Johannissyan Research Institute in the Humanities in Yerevan and the Beirut Institute of Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR) in Lebanon.
The Fragile Body and the Damaged Subject: A Decade of Crisis and Resistance (1998–2008) If in the early to mid-1990s, performative actions in Armenia were, to a large extent, launched by situational or strategic collectives and groups as interventions—as correctives to institutional operations of the state and the artworld—and motivated by the desire to communicate…
Performances of Politics in a Nation-State (1991–98) Armenian performative practices and “art actions” in the 1990s were characterized less by grand gestures of plentitude and excess and more by austere, minimal, and often barely visible acts engaging with the triviality…
Series Introduction This series of three articles presents a selection of the performative practices in Armenian art in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, practices that would herald the separation of nonofficial artists from the official Soviet cultural discourses and practices, and subsequently, in the 1990s, mark the institutionalization of nonofficial or semiofficial art as “contemporary…
