Karlo Kacharava (1964–1994), a prominent Georgian artist, writer, art critic, and poet, has been referred to as “the voice of his generation”¹ and a “supernova.”² In my contribution to the book Karlo Kacharava: Sentimental Traveller, published in 2023 on the occasion of Kacharava’s solo exhibition in Ghent at S.M.A.K., I discuss the intertwining of his “oceanic” body of work, both visual and written, with his short but extraordinary life.³ However, in the present essay, I have chosen to focus on his Erased Portraits of Politicians (c. 1988), which are lesser known yet nonetheless important and provocative. In the nine graphic works that make up this seminal series, Kacharava repurposed existing photographs of Soviet politicians printed on high-quality photographic paper that, in their rebirth, not only acquire new meaning but also function allegorically in decolonial discourse.

Even though Kacharava, commonly known as simply “Karlo,”⁴ was a monumental figure in Georgia in the late 20th century, founding collectives in the 1980s that played significant roles in the broader Caucasus, he has only recently garnered international recognition and institutional interest. While his works are now being “discovered” and explored by transnational scholars, curators, and researchers, they have been a powerful presence, albeit unseen or perhaps effaced or otherwise hidden, for much longer. Erased Portraits of Politicians represent a prodigious example of Karlo’s storytelling—juxtaposing symbolism with endless possibilities for knowledge contribution and imagination to draw parallels with the past that connect it to the present and future. In repurposing existing photographs of Soviet politicians, the artist has presented a perfect metaphor for the double-sided nature of history. The result is a showcase of captivating drawings and graphic works posthumously exhibited in 2023–24 in the artist’s first institutional show in Europe, where they were displayed so that viewers could see both the front and back sides of each image (figs. 1, 2).⁵ The curatorial decision to present the works in this way accentuates their multilayered meaning, an essential aspect of the series (figs.3-8).

In contemporary discourse, the reuse or recycling of materials is considered a sustainable and environmentally friendly practice. However, in Georgia in the early 1990s, it was a necessity due to the scarcity of art supplies. Karlo was not unusual in his decision to repurpose existing materials—in this case, photographs of politicians—but how he chose to do so is nonetheless interesting. Rather than simply covering up the photographs in black to create a fresh background for his new images, the artist employed a thick brush dipped in black ink to smudge them. This technique left behind ghostly silhouettes, suggesting the presence of the individuals in the original photographs while effectively obscuring their identities. On the blank reverse sides of the photographs, he then created new drawings. Through the deliberate act of “erasing” the original portraits, and simultaneously intertwining them with his own imagery, he established a complex dialogue surrounding themes of identity, representation, and the ephemeral nature of political power. These two-sided works serve not only to critique the prominence of political figures but also to challenge viewers to consider the implications of narrative erasure. In doing so, the artist invites a reflection on those voices that can become marginalized or invisible within contemporary discourse.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”
—Carl Jung⁶

In a manner akin to the erasure of specific political identity enacted in Karlo’s series, Georgia’s national identity has been systematically suppressed for more than a century, resulting in enduring postcolonial trauma.⁷ Indeed, more than thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Georgia still carry the pain of suppression. Could we potentially analyze our colonial history through the framework of Jungian theory of light and shadow? Carl Jung proposed that the latter symbolizes the unacknowledged or repressed aspects of the self. According to Jung, these elements, though often considered unacceptable or oppressed, can potentially be “resolved” or “repaired” by bringing them to the forefront of consciousness.⁸ This dynamic suggests that the content of the shadow is not fixed. Can this framework give us a deeper understanding of identity and collective subconscious memory? How can we construct a decolonized and enlightened future by acknowledging and confronting the “dark shadows” of our history, and what measures can we take to prevent their recurrence? In what ways can recognizing the historical actions of colonialism and their enduring consequences assist us in transcending our nation’s distressing legacy? While these questions are hard to answer—and perhaps serve more as a simple invitation for thought than a groundbreaking means of resolving postcolonial trauma—we could mirror Karlo’s unconventional approach in our own discussion of political and/or philosophical matters.

I want to write so my texts don’t sound political or philosophical in general, but I’d rather simplify political and philosophical matters, and things like that, to the point of poetry.
—Karlo Kacharava⁹

The transformative process of translating “political or philosophical matters” into poetic expression lies at the core of Karlo’s artistic practice—whether visual or written. Just as it is crucial to consider his poetry and other writings as integral components of his visual art, we must take his visual art into account when examining his work as a writer. Karlo commenced composing poems at a tender age, and his poetry reveals the evolution of his thought processes over the course of his lifetime. For example, “The Angel of Travels” (1987), translated below, is vividly cinematic, conveying Karlo’s emotions and capturing his anxieties at a particular moment in time. It not only reflects his fondness for German Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism, but also serves as a window into his multiverse, where his bold images blur with condensed text, evoking a wide range of emotions and their universality. Given that Karlo wrote this poem around the same time he created his series Erased Portraits of Politicians, it feels both natural and essential to highlight it here.

“The Angel of Travels”¹⁰

It’s hot out. You are lying in a train.
You think about many things at once—
this road, the landscape, and the houses
are a reflection of your thoughts:
what you can neither call accidental nor accept,
and what is divine, because it is auspicious,
and wistful, too, since it has passed.
Moons light heavy bridges.
This river begins your native land
and you fall asleep.
In a dream, you see:
People gather in a hall, take their seats.
They’re showing a Bergman picture.
A white labyrinth appears on the black screen.
Unexpectedly, the film is packed with action.
Actors step out of the screen into real life
and then go back into the movie.
Snow, a soliloquy, a clock,
another soliloquy.
Unhappy trepidation over
what will happen to somebody close.
The telephone, the clock again.
A train in a train.
On the lower part of the compartment ceiling
are the words: “Open-Closed.”
Lights in the moving corridor.
Flying ghostly companions
outside the window.
The hall was like some kind of weirdo movie studio.
They don’t know anything in this pavilion, either.
A sleepwalker’s piano.
Then
the father washes the feet of the son,
as if baptizing him.
O, the spinning of stars reflected in the river
And the sad angel of travels,
His brow clear, gazing down
Upon the passengers’ troubled slumber.

Just as in his poetry, which is loaded with visual references, Karlo’s paintings and drawings, and specifically his Erased Portraits of Politicians, bear deeper, hidden meanings and cryptic symbolism, some of which require local knowledge. The back side of each portrait has been, in effect, turned into a front side, a few of which depict nude women or nude couples in erotic poses. Although the political figures in the photographs have been rendered unidentifiable, to those familiar with Soviet history, they likely call to mind political propaganda and other instruments of imperial power designed to shape public narratives and manipulate perceptions. In stark contrast, Karlo’s own figures are bold, provocative, and collectively stand free from the confines of prejudice, propaganda, and censorship. These mixed-media works bridge German Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism while also encompassing the dark history of 20th-century Georgia.¹¹

In his solo exhibition at S.M.A.K., Karlo’s nine drawings were presented in double-sided frames, showcasing his boldness and free-spiritedness while simultaneously evoking the political suppression that preceded them. This visual dexterity begs the question of whether the “erased” local histories in the broader transnational context might be presented and embedded in a similar way. The concept of visionary experience, as described by Carl Jung, highlights that the aesthetics of German Expressionism are fundamentally rooted in the collective unconscious.¹² In contrast to psychological art, which seeks to articulate the collective conscious, German Expressionism achieves two key goals: It “compensates the culture for its biases” by illuminating what is often “ignored or repressed,” and it may also “predict something of the future direction of a culture.”¹³ What if we conceptualize the smudged blackness in Erased Portraits of Politicians through a Jungian psychological framework, interpreting it as a manifestation of darkness or unconscious trauma, a representation of Georgia’s colonized past within the context of decolonization?

By acknowledging it and incorporating it into our contemporary narrative, in a way that is similar to the exhibition’s presentation of the series, we avoid merely obscuring this darkness; instead, we render it a visible, intrinsic aspect of the artwork. Engaging with this historical reality presents significant challenges and may elicit deep feelings of injustice, particularly within the current Georgian sociopolitical landscape. Nevertheless, grappling with these uncomfortable truths is essential to fostering genuine progress, to decentralizing narratives, and to facilitating collective healing and freedom from the trauma of the colonial past.

A man who continually erases the footprints that attest to his presence somewhere has a need to erase some of the footprints of his cohabitants, as well, so that they are not mistaken for his own by still others who are asleep or who have not opened the door, or who will never write you a letter.
Nobody, nobody, nothing.
— Karlo Kacharava¹⁴

Karlo engaged with themes of constrained or erased freedom and identity within his Erased Portraits of Politicians and across his other works—including in Fahrstuhl Morella (1987), which hangs in the hallway of his home in Saburtalo, a neighborhood in Tbilisi (fig. 9). This abstract piece depicts two interwoven forms evoking elevators suspended by “ropes” in a field of seemingly unlimited light green. Executed on cardboard that has been folded in half, it can be interpreted as representing different realities coexisting within the same space—life in the Soviet Union and life outside of it—or even life and death. Moreover, it reflects the sociopolitical context in which the ability to travel beyond the borders of the Soviet Union remained, until the state’s collapse in 1991, an unattainable luxury for many. On a philosophical level, Fahrstuhl Morella probes the concept of eternal freedom, articulated as the capacity to navigate spaces devoid of borders or physical constraints. Notably, this piece, created contemporaneously with Erased Portraits of Politicians, is most likely influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s short Gothic horror story “Morella,” first published in 1835, which explores themes of identity, death, and the uncanny resurrection of the dead. The exploration of freedom—both in metaphysical and geographical dimensions—is a pervasive motif throughout Karlo’s work.

Karlo persistently challenged the polarization inherent in the binary constructs of “us” versus “them,” which are frequently articulated through the lens of “West” versus “East” or “West” versus “Other.” His approach exemplifies a profound application of decolonial thought. Indeed, Karlo situated these categories within a horizontal, nonhierarchical framework, thereby emphasizing the intricate interconnectedness of identities within a transnational landscape. Furthermore, Karlo’s advocacy for a decentralized narrative for Georgia in the early 1990s predates the current discourse on decolonization in Georgian art history, highlighting the foresight of his perspective.¹⁵ In Jung’s analytical psychology, one recognizes that light and shadow are not mutually exclusive; rather, they coexist, often with shadow being significantly oppressed or suppressed. Acknowledging the darkness of the traumatic colonial history and incorporating it (rather than avoiding or suppressing it) may help to overcome the traumatic post-Soviet histories.

In conclusion, the journey of overcoming the postcolonial Soviet past and its accompanying trauma in Georgia is an arduous and protracted one. Engaging in discussions that illuminate these often-overlooked aspects of history and incorporating them into our daily consciousness is vital for collective healing. This necessity is particularly salient in the current political climate within Georgia, where historical narratives are frequently contested and reshaped. The recent uncovering of Erased Portraits of Politicians exemplifies this dynamic. These artworks, long obscured from view and largely unrecognized by the international art community, provide an invaluable opportunity to reflect on the mechanisms of memory, identity, and representation. By presenting both sides of the erased faces of political figures, this series acts not only as a visual statement but also as a powerful metaphor for the complexities of decoloniality. It underscores the imperative to confront the historical silencing of certain narratives and to actively reconstruct a more inclusive understanding of our past. This approach is essential for fostering a more equitable and just society, as it encourages ongoing dialogue about the layers of history that inform our present and future.

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Paul Galloway: An aspect of your work that intrigues me is that it is steeped in the visual culture of India—and Mumbai, in particular. Can you give us a bit of information on your upbringing, and how the rapid changes you witnessed growing up in the 1980s–90s impacted your development as artists?

Sameer Kulavoor: We grew up in the northern suburbs of Bombay, a small world in the 1980s–90s. But things changed very fast after 1990. That’s when the government introduced economic liberalization that created major changes that meant, suddenly, there were brands we had never seen in India—like McDonald’s or Levi’s or MTV. A lot of younger people also started getting more interested in what was happening outside the country. So, I think [that] that period of the ’90s was very critical to a lot of these cities around India, not just Bombay. The farmlands gave way to more housing apartments and infrastructure. The road that used to be kind of like the grazing patch for donkeys became a major thoroughfare, and today there is a metro line passing [through] there. And our family was unique because we come from a Hindu-Muslim interfaith marriage.

Zeenat Kulavoor: Our personal background also shaped our perspective. We come from an interfaith family—a Muslim from South India and a Hindu, a Gujarati from Bombay—and there was a class difference between our parents as well. Growing up in that environment taught us acceptance at many levels. Even language played a role: My maternal side used the Gujarati language and script, while my father’s side spoke Beary Bashe—a dialect that is a mix of Malayalam, Kannada, and Tulu, but it has no written script. At home, we spoke English, mixed with Gujarati and Beary Bashe, while outside, we used Hindi in daily life. Later, at art school, we picked up Marathi, which we now use regularly to maneuver the city. And after I married my partner, whose Mangalorean family speaks Tulu and uses Kannada, the linguistic mix expanded even further. This multicultural and multilingual context is inseparable from who we are and inevitably influences how we see and create.

PG: Can you give me a sense of your professional lives before you started Bombay Duck Designs? Sameer, you worked in advertising, right?

SK: Before I got into art school, I used to do a lot of cartoons and illustrations for my college magazine. Between 1998 and 2000, during the dot-com boom, I joined a design team on a website. I ended up learning a lot of software, and I started to understand animation using Flash. At that point I continued freelancing with advertising agencies working for brands. Simultaneously, I was also involved with the indie music scene in Bombay. That led to me designing album covers during that decade for friends and the circle. I continued freelancing until 2008, when I formalized Bombay Duck Designs. 

ZK: Pre art school, I was drawn to scripts and languages through my family and loved collecting everyday objects and visual ephemera—labels, wrappers, tickets—elements that later informed the Everyday India project. At art school, I majored in typography, which brought these interests together, and focused extensively on Urdu—a natural choice given my background and fascination with scripts carrying layered histories. After graduating, I worked on Urdu-related projects with various agencies before freelancing with Sameer. We began with an album cover and soon moved on to larger projects, including one of the early large-scale independent music festivals of India, where we designed everything from the identity to the stages and environments.

PG: I think the name “Bombay Duck” (a commonly eaten fish native to the waters in and around Bombay) perfectly encapsulates your design ethos, which is rooted in the everyday culture of India. This ethos comes across in your amazing zines, and I wonder . . . what drew you to that format? 

SK: I think it came from a general frustration with how design projects work. Many times, I felt that a certain thing I had created for a commercial project wasn’t doing the idea justice. That drew me to the medium of zines, where I could talk about something that means a lot to me without compromising on how I’d like to express it. In a sense, self-publishing laid the foundation for my own art practice.

ZK: The first one we made was Zeroxwallah zine, which talks about Bombay photocopy shops. I remember [that] when we started making this book, it was simply because the subject, the format, and the effort excited us. We decided to make about 50 copies, show them to people, and see how it went.

SK: Our college was very close to Fort (a neighborhood in the city), which has a high concentration of photocopy shops. And we found it fascinating because all of these shops have the same branding and color scheme. Every one [of them] sticks to yellow and black; every one [of them] has a similar way of using bold type. So, the idea of creating a photocopied zine that talks about photocopy shops felt very meta and interesting. 

PG: What did the people working in these shops think when they were printing this book about themselves?

ZK: While photocopying the first few pages, they didn’t understand what we were doing. Eventually, when we were binding the book together, they asked, “Why are you doing this? Who’s going to buy this?”

SK: We took pictures of the exteriors of certain shops from that area, and the workers spotted rival shops. “These guys are our competitors . . . why have you featured them?” And then there is this very interesting phenomenon where people in India use the [company name] “Xerox” as a verb or a noun “Can you xerox this?” or “Please give me a xerox of this sheet.” The Xerox company objected to the use of their name on shops, and so shop sign makers simply repainted the X with a Z.

PG: A theme that comes across in much of your work is a focus on taxonomies of visual culture of India—an indexing of commerce and architecture and social life. What is it about this everyday visual experience that fascinates you both?

SK: When you look at any city, you’re trying to decode [its] layers. So, the first thing that you see is shop or road signage. And then there are walls covered with graphics, posters, or public art; building facades and surfaces that may be of a certain material—brick, concrete, tiles and so on—or construction sites covered by metal sheets, debris protection fabric, or blue tarpaulin sheets. There are several layers depending on your vantage point. While it may seem like absolute chaos to someone who is not familiar with it, for us it became a way to understand the logic and chronology of how things form. When your senses are overloaded, you want to break it down into understandable parts. 

ZK: We’re simply trying to make sense of the country and the city in our own way, and that comes out in the form of zines, artworks, and murals. Take the blue tarpaulin sheet, or tadpatri as we call it locally, for example.

SK: The blue tarpaulin sheet is omnipresent when you’re going through the daily rigor of life in Bombay. But no one has the time or the mental bandwidth to dwell on these things. 

ZK: Yet, you can look at this piece of blue plastic and see that it’s significant. It reflects socioeconomic conditions, ways of living, and the resourcefulness of people who adapt and creatively use this material.

PG: Your practices make me think of others who have tried to tackle the complexities of urbanism. In his research for the font Gotham, typographer Tobias Frere-Jones photographed thousands of building addresses and signs across Manhattan, documenting the diversity of letterforms in the wild in order to distill vernacular typography into one typeface that would represent the ethos of New York City. You two take an alternative approach and embrace the diversity and wide range of not only typefaces and languages but also visual cultures that you find. I think that, in a way, that’s an embrace of chaos. 

SK: We never consciously set out with the idea to embrace chaos, it just happened. The other aspect to this is that there is currently a politically rooted attempt to homogenize culture in India—like imposing Hindi in the South Indian states, for example. Such impositions or blanket rules, we feel, are dangerous. It becomes a responsibility to show people the richness of this so-called chaos. There is a lot of work to be done to make Bombay and India more livable in certain parts, but this aspect of plurality or multiplicity is part of our DNA.  

PG: In the dramatic structures of your Metromorphosis project here, we see the churn of history, architecture, and community that happens in all urban environments sped up, with chaotic accretions and evidence of past lives. What do you think we risk losing when we pursue order and homogeneity to its furthest extent?

SK: Architect and academic Rahul Mehrotra in his text about Metromorphosis notes a kind of emulation that is commonly occurring: “The presence of the ‘edifice complex’ in Manhattan, New York, that grew naturally out of the accumulation of capital then circulated around the globe. Singapore wanted to be the Manhattan of Asia and then Shanghai wanted to be the Singapore of China. Politicians and Capitalists in India want to make Mumbai Shanghai and then, for example Nasik aspires to be Mumbai and the small towns near Nasik then aspire to be Nasik and so on.”¹ Homogenization can consume culture and texture—and not just within India. This loss of identity in design is a complicated issue and needs a nuanced understanding and more conversations. We talk about this in our work, trying to show people that the richness of what India is is at risk in this flattening of everything from architecture to graphic design. 

PG: I think your interest in the visual taxonomy of India functions similarly to the many efforts across the world to preserve endangered languages. Particularly with [the exhibition] Everyday India, it’s like you’re documenting a visual dialect. Is this something that you see as a mission for yourselves?

SK: Recognizing multiplicity and plurality is a recurring factor in our work—while also not getting nostalgic or sentimental about the past. And I think we want to keep that factor alive in our work, especially in this atmosphere, where there is a real risk of things being wiped out. We are excited about the future and how it can be shaped.

ZK: We feel that deeply these days, which is why Everyday India felt so important. It gave us a chance to do something we might not have done otherwise—to make people notice the multiplicity around them. We’re always photographing things, posters, architecture, fragments of design that catch our eye. It’s part of our daily rhythm, something we both do in our own ways. The show allowed us to share that, spark conversations, and see how everyone else was feeling. 

PG: I think a strength of your practice is this idea of looking at the world from the ground up rather than from an aerial view. Because, as you say, when viewed from above, everything becomes flattened, whereas from the ground, everything is rich and full of texture and variety. 

SK: Having such a vantage point becomes important in these kinds of scenarios. We walk a lot. We’re on the ground level a lot. We don’t live in a 40-floor high-rise; we like to be grounded and keep our eyes and ears open to what’s happening at the street level. It’s very easy to find ways to cut off the chaos and have a very comfortable life. A lot of decisions we make in our day-to-day life, like where do you want your studio to be or where do you want to go for a trip—those kinds of very personal decisions are shaped by the logic of not wanting to be cut off from the ground level. It percolates into our daily lives. It’s a habit that you want to live a certain kind of life, to be able to do a certain kind of work. As we grow older, I think, for us, it becomes important to hold on to that.

This conversation stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024-2026 Bombay/Mumbai program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

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Romuald Hazoumè (born 1962, Porto-Novo, Benin) began his artistic training unintentionally. Between the ages of 10 and 12, he made masks as part of a Kaléta group.² Kaléta is a tradition mainly carried out by children that was imported to the Republic of Benin in the mid-19th century by former Afro-Brazilian slaves who returned to Africa and settled in Benin. Group members perform during popular celebrations such as Christmas and New Year’s. Kaléta places a strong emphasis on playfulness and scenic art, typically comprising singers, musicians, dancers, and mask-makers. Unlike most traditional Beninese masks, which are made from wood, Kaléta masks are made from discarded everyday objects or materials, such as plastic jerrycans or cardboard, making them more varied in shape and color and often more visually flamboyant. When I interviewed Hazoumè in the spring of 2025, he reminisced about making Kaléta masks as a youth, unaware that this process would lead him to become a renowned artist.³

Hazoumè’s special connection to masks comes not only from his engagement with the Kaléta tradition as a child but also from his Yoruba heritage, specifically as it relates to being a descendant of Lali Alomavo, who was a Babalawo (Voodoo high priest) and advisor to King Dê-Sodji (r. 1848–64) of Hogbonou (now Porto-Novo). Yorubas use masks in various rituals and cults, for example, the Gélédé, a ceremony that pays tribute to Iyà Nlà, the Great Mother, and to the role of women in Yoruba society. On this occasion, the men don masks, dance, and sing, sometimes playing satirical or parodic games, to entertain and honor the women.

Heir to these legacies, Hazoumè posits his artworks, whether created individually or collaboratively, as celebratory and commemorative objects through which he can address a range of topics. The artist prefers to use plastic for their fabrication, rather than the wood favored by the Yoruba, as it is more malleable and lends itself readily to various formal and conceptual experimentations.⁴ Since the 1980s, he has collected plastic gasoline jerrycans used by smugglers along the border separating Benin and Nigeria, which he recycles and transforms into mask sculptures, thus creating works that evoke both contemporary geopolitical and economic issues and local tradition. These containers, the same ones that he has used since childhood, remain his go-to material. For him, the geometric forms of traditional African masks are visible in the shapes of gasoline cans and other everyday objects, which he cuts and remakes into what he calls “masque-bidons” or “mask-cans.” In this way, tradition is never too far removed and can be illustrated using nontraditional materials. Hazoumè’s masks are, in effect, “traditional” ready-mades.

In Yoruba culture, each mask has a cultural, social, and spiritual personality. Hazoumè builds on this concept to craft sculptures that serve as documentary portraits. For example, he created a notable piece titled Bororo du Niger in 1992 after meeting a Bororo/Wodaabe man (fig. 1). This artwork features a face of a Wodaabe male adorned in the makeup and jewelry associated with the annual Gerewol festival, a beauty contest in which young men decorate themselves and perform the Yaake, a ritual dance to seduce young women eligible for marriage. Another example of Hazoumè’s documentary masks is Aloda from 1996 (fig. 2). During the period he created this piece, Hazoumè was researching Yoruba women’s matrimonial hairstyles, a coded language that functions as a kind of social identity card. In the precolonial era, a woman’s hairstyle commonly indicated whether she was single, of marriageable age, married, unfaithful, or experiencing issues in her household. The Aloda hairstyle represented in this portrait, with its cornrows covering the entire skull, leaving the top of the forehead clear, suggests that the married woman is at peace in her home. While some artworks dwell on ancestral forms and ritual, others—like Petite from 1999 (fig. 3)—take their cue from modern life and the artist’s personal encounters. Indeed, he conceived of Petite, which he composed using a typewriter and a cleaning brush, as a tribute to a secretary he had met in Cuba. He was struck by her low wage of just $6 a day, especially considering he had just spent $110 in a single day.⁵

By using discarded everyday objects, especially those made of plastic, Hazoumè critiques the trivialization of the African mask form since the frenzy that emerged in the West in the early 20th century when Westerners first saw the traditional African sculptures and masks brought back from the African colonies by soldiers, missionaries, scientists, and merchants.⁶ Their presence in the West, and particularly their display in museums, has given them new ethnological and artistic value, distancing them in some ways from their original ritual and cultural significance in Africa. These newly discovered forms captivated Westerners, particularly artists and collectors, and led to their increasing popularity. This growing interest also led to a rise in the trade of counterfeit objects, which persists to this day. As descendants of the Beninese mask tradition, Hazoumè’s works reflect on this frenzy for and ensuing trivialization of the African mask shape through a sarcastic touch that dilutes tradition by using humble materials from consumerist society.

Classical African arts, particularly masks and statues, have been a significant topic of discussion in the relationship between the West and Africa since the 20th century. Does displaying traditional African pieces in Western museums compromise their original nature? Should these works even be housed in Western collections?⁷ Sub-Saharan African visual artists of the 1960s were not concerned with addressing this subject directly, as they were primarily focused on pursuing modernity through new forms. This pursuit was often achieved through a distancing from traditional African sculpture, as seen in the work of Aina Onabolu (born Nigeria, 1882–1963) or Iba Ndiaye (French, born Senegal, 1928–2008). Alternatively, some artists, like Christian Lattier (born Ivory Coast, 1925–1978), and art movements such as the Zaria Art Society (1958–1962) or the Dakar School (1960s–1970s), have sought to integrate or reinvent traditional African art forms. However, this work seldom directly criticizes the Western world’s relationship with classical African art.

Romuald Hazoumè was one of the first contemporary artists on the African continent to work on the appropriation and reinterpretation of masks.⁸ Deeply rooted in his Yoruba culture, Hazoumè considers himself to be a present-day aré. In the days of the Yoruba kingdoms, the arés were itinerant artists appointed to create art for the royal court who spread their knowledge and culture from kingdom to kingdom. Hazoumè claims to uphold this tradition by spreading his artistic vision across localities where his assembled masks initiate larger debates.

The assemblage of mask-cans is the artist’s favorite technique for installations, allowing him to layer his work with meaning. Displayed together, the mask-cans unite their voices and personalities to convey multiple threads. His mask-cans converge, for example, different temporalities and symbolize the irreducible link between individuals and their history. Indeed, the plastic gasoline containers recovered and transformed into masks by Romuald Hazoumè bear traces of the memories of the individuals who owned them, featured in the touches of blue, red, yellow, white, or green paint on their surface. In Benin, transporters and sellers of smuggled gasoline use distinctive marks not only to identify themselves among each other while trading with Nigeria but also to protect themselves, since the transport of gasoline is a dangerous business. According to the artist, the color refers to the consciousness or unconsciousness of the Beninese individual, which is attached to the Voodoo religion. Indeed, as he explains: “During their childhood at home, the fuel transporters experienced Voodoo ceremonies in their backyards before converting to Christianity or Islam. Growing up in that environment, they learned that, for example, red could be a protective color. Each person thus adopts the cult color that is personal to them at home.”⁹ Red refers to the Voodoo cult of Shango, the god of justice, lightning, and thunder; blue to the cult of Yemaya, the goddess of the sea; yellow to the cult of Elegba, the god of encounters and an intermediary between other Voodoos; white to the cult of Damballah, the god of fecundity; or green to the cult of Oduduwa, the creator god. Thus, these mask-cans, through color, represent, for the artist, the faces of the individuals who once carried them. Their assemblage in installations enables the artist to tackle a variety of societal discourses.

For example, in 1997, Hazoumè created his first well-known large-scale installation, La Bouche du roi (fig. 4).¹⁰ Held by the British Museum, this multimedia work is a tribute to the memory of slavery and the transatlantic trade that took place from the 17th to the 19th century between Dahomey, the Americas, and Europe.¹¹ The mask-cans attached to the conscious or unconscious mind of their previous owners illustrate here the difficulty of obscuring the memory of slavery, as it is a deep-rooted history shared by African, European, and American people alike. Hazoumè’s artwork is a life-size representation of a slave ship containing 304 African slaves—each represented by a mask-can—who are crammed together in the ship’s hold. The artist based his reconstruction on the 1789 plans of the Brookes, a renowned British slave ship.¹² At the front of the ship, two masks are arranged, set apart from the rest of the group by a rifle, emphasizing the violence associated with the trade. They represent the characters of Chacha de Souza (in yellow) and the king of the Kingdom of Dahomey, Adandozan (1797–1818), and/or his brother Ghézo (1818–1858; in black), upon whom he depended. Francisco Félix de Souza (1754–1849) was a major slave trader and the chacha, chief under the authority of the Dahomean king of the town of Ouidah, the hub of the Dahomean slave trade. Together, the king and the chacha were responsible for the slave trade: the king captured the slaves, while the chacha sold them to the Europeans. Both were responsible for transporting slaves to the Americas, and as a result, held the captain’s position at the bow of the ship La Bouche du roi. Through his installation, Hazoumè confronts this chapter in Beninese history. According to the artist, taking responsibility in the present for the future means understanding both culture and the past, however hard it may be.

Even if it tackles a historical subject, La Bouche du roi bears contemporary resonances as it evokes the smuggling of raw materials and goods as well as modern-day forms of forced labor. Looking at his work in the present time, Hazoumè connects it to the current treatment of sub-Saharan migrants in Libya or that of South Asian workers in the Gulf countries, even though he had not yet considered those issues in 1997.¹³

In later works, such as Rat Singer, Second Only to God! (2013), the artist chose to address poor governance in modern nation-states. Rat Singer, Second Only to God! (fig. 5) depicts a pirogue sinking into a sea of mask-cans. On the boat’s deck, a white rat symbolizes the figure of the immoral ruler. The rat wears blinding dark glasses and is seemingly unaware of the disaster unfolding below. The work is a sarcastic political critique of the inaction of certain heads of state, especially dictators, regarding the issues that affect their citizens’ lives.

A more recent work, ASÈ (2024), created as part of Everything Precious Is Fragile, the first Republic of Benin pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, encapsulates the multiple threads in Hazoumè’s practice.¹⁴ This work is built with 540 plastic gasoline jerrycans to form a more than 13-foot-high hut with two opposing entrances (fig. 6). Smoothed on the outside using a process of plastic melting, the structure appears to have been built from raw earth, reminiscent of traditional architecture in Benin. Inside, the hundreds of colored mask-cans encircle and immerse the visitor in a meditative penumbra, barely illuminated by only a few beams of light (fig. 7). ASÈ was conceived as a sacred temple, reflecting the strong imprint of Voodoo religion on Beninese culture. During colonization, Voodoo was fought by Christian missionaries, and then it was banned by the Marxist regime of President Mathieu Kérékou in the 1970s.¹⁵ Despite these attempts throughout time and history, Voodoo has remained a part of Beninese culture. The artist thought of ASÈ as a space in which, upon entering, visitors could meditate, make a vow, and say “ASÈ,” which in Yoruba means “amen” and “so be it” but also “power.” The mask-cans functioned here as signifiers of the psychological connection between individuals and the Voodoo religion.

According to Hazoumè, there is power in returning to one’s history and culture, and ASÈ is his first installation entirely dedicated to traditional Beninese culture and speaks for it, fully embracing heritage as “a contemporary solution.” As the artist noted in 2024: “Today, our biggest problem as Africans is that we look at Europe, and we want to do what Europe does. But we can embrace our culture and be ourselves. When you talk about your own culture, you have a place in the world, which is not the case when you talk about someone else’s culture. Today we have to look at home.”¹⁶

A looping recorded recitation of a panegyric praising Tassin Hangbé, the warrior queen who ruled the Kingdom of Dahomey, now the Republic of Benin, from 1708 to 1711, highlights the significance of women’s role and power in Beninese society. Tassin Hangbé is recognized for having created the Amazons, also known as the Agodjé, an all-female military regiment that remained active until the end of the 19th century, when Dahomey was colonized. Through the Queen’s tale, the artwork presents an ode to women, echoing the Yoruba idiom “Iya Alachê” or “Iya ASÈ,” that is, “The woman has power.”

Romuald Hazoumè is an heir to the Beninese and Yoruba mask traditions, embracing both continuity and transformation. His work, which illustrates and critiques various historical and contemporary themes, is often also infused with a sense of humor or parody, drawing from the legacy of the Kaléta or Gélédé. In Hazoumè’s art, tradition and memory are not only preserved but also reimagined through everyday objects. By doing so, the Beninese artist positions himself as a guardian of memory and an actor in the formation of a new consciousness.

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In 1907, Oskar Kokoschka (1886­–1980) was commissioned to create an illustrated fairy tale for the children of Fritz Waerndorfer, founding member and financial supporter of the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s premier design workshop. In Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1917), Kokoschka produced a haunting narrative poem about the awakening of adolescent sexuality, set on distant islands, far removed from modern city life and bourgeois society. His meticulously crafted text draws on familiar tropes from classical and contemporary literature, including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Viennese writer Peter Altenberg. While nostalgia is an essential trope of the Romantic period, Kokoschka’s work subverts this emerging canon. His work transforms what should have been a Romantic-style evocation of nostalgia and passes traditional wisdom through myth into a critical dismantling of such a gesture. The designs in the artist’s lithographs exemplify the prevalent decorative style of fin de siècle Vienna, showcasing his adept integration of various “primitivist” trends in European art. This is evident in Die träumenden Knaben’s cloisonné-like outlines, unconventional perspectives, and flat color planes.

Aside from the aspiration to awaken emotions across a vast geography, Romanticism was hardly a united cultural movement. Poets and writers such as Alexander Pushkin in Russia and Lord Byron in Britain were immersed in rethinking histories of imperial conquests and state-building. The emerging heroism of national liberation movements after the collapse of Napoleonic imperialism in Greece, for example, served as the utmost inspiration for Romantic literary mythmaking. Creating poetry out of the heavily imagined past while weaving new mythologies through it as a powerful embodiment of the Romantic style. Goethe asserted that “the highest lyric is decidedly historical,” alluding to the power of synergy between fact and fiction in shaping the ideological foreground of discourse through literature.¹ In the age of economic rationalization, Romanticism stood as a mystic guard of the unyielding power of subjective imagination. Applied to actual historical narratives, it became a powerful tool in constructing political imaginaries.

In 1818, Lord Byron published Mazeppa, a narrative poem introducing Hetman Ivan Mazepa (1639–1709), a political leader of borderland Ukraine who, a century before, had stood at the fateful historical intersection between the warring Swedish and Russian Empires. Undoubtedly, Hetman Mazepa played a crucial role in the war as custodian of a borderland; however, the exact details of his actions are disputed, leaving an empty vehicle for Romanticist imagination. Mazepa is known for changing allegiances, but the precise circumstances of his shifts are apocryphal. He initially supported Russian emperor Peter I (r. 1682/1721–25) but later defected to the side of Swedish king Charles XII (r. 1697–1718). As little is known about Mazepa from historical sources, Byron had the freedom to experiment with sentimental inventions. In Mazeppa (1819), he portrays the hetman (commander) as a youthful hero, a romantic soldier of fortune famous for his aesthetic tastes, and a supporter of arts and culture. Ten years later, Russian Golden Age poet Alexander Pushkin published, like a delayed “rhapsodic battle” with Byron, his own interpretation of Mazepa’s story in Poltava (1828–29). In Pushkin’s poem, the hetman is portrayed as an ailing traitor of the Russian Empire, a ridiculous and horrible old man.

Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi (b. 1985) has revived the Romantic-age rivalry with a transhistorical twist, revealing how a core stylistic element of Romanticism lingers in contemporary times, namely in the form of an uncompromising agonism. In his video work The Battle Over Mazepa (2023), commissioned jointly by Pushkin House in London and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, Ridnyi cast spoken-word artists from around Europe to stage an actual rhapsodic narrative battle of rendering and creating subjective takes of Byron’s and Pushkin’s stories. Referred to by the artist as a “rap battle,” the medium is more akin to the practice of the ancient Greek aoidoi (Attic bards or storytellers) who performed poems as narrative stories. While Ridnyi bridges the ancient and contemporary forms of weaving the narrative, Byron’s and Pushkin’s respective storytelling can be considered “a narrative digression,” or parékbasis in Attic, the important bardic strategy in which the narrator intentionally alters details of the story to deliver a moral, ethical, or political “lesson” to the audience while retaining recognizable fundamentals.

Ridnyi’s video reveals the transhistorical nature of political agonism by layering ancient tradition, Romantic source material, and contemporary style. The concept of agonism is rooted in the works of Nazi political scientist Carl Schmitt, who insisted that binary conflict is a natural state of the political animal—and that winning by any means is the only way to ensure survival.² More recently, political theorist Chantal Mouffe has developed agonism into a more general paradigm of looking at conflict as a healthy state of affairs and mitigating it as a fundamental task of the political system. Mouffe has criticized the possibility of post-conflictual mediation societies, which she thinks only serves to bury the conflict temporarily and, in effect, to create a ticking time bomb. The essential point here is that while agonism is discussed as natural, assigning roles in a friend-enemy distinction is highly volatile depending on the evolution of the context.³

In casting spoken-word artists as contemporary bards, none of whom were previously familiar with Byron’s Mazeppa or Pushkin’s Poltava, Ridnyi focused on the diversifying representation of those who contemporaneously weave the historical narratives anew, indicating the enduring relevance of re-rendering stories in modern political and culture wars. Before filming, the bards participated in a workshop led by Susanne Strätling, professor of Eastern European studies at Freie Universität Berlin. Mediated by Ridnyi and Strätling, the artists read Mazeppa and Poltava, and each formed a subjective interpretation of Mazepa’s character based on the literary portrayals—choosing their side (for or against the hetman) in the process. Mazepa served as source material in the agonistic setup for the artists in the video—reminiscent of contemporary tendencies of turning cultural memory into a site of an emotive battle of subjective truisms.

The 20-minute-long film, shot in 4K in a Berlin warehouse on a hot summer day, showcases rhapsodic battles against a pitch-black background. This staging recalls Kokoschka’s illustrations in which the baroque complexity of the Romantic backdrop is nullified by the flat, color-saturated figures set against a black background, highlighting their presence and accentuating the agonistic tension between them. In the film, the camera moves between pairs of poets performing the twisted verses inspired by Byron’s and Pushkin’s texts. The action is framed by chanting extras, who evoke an ancient theater choir. These singers carry meme-like banners and flags akin to the frequently posted short opinion statements on social media.

In their respective epochs, Kokoschka and Ridnyi each subverted the aesthetics of Romantic storytelling: They stripped the beautifying surroundings and focus on the essence of the brutal agonistic argument in place. They effectively challenged not only Romanticism as a literary and artistic movement but the act of romanticization of anything—and this leads to a fundamental questioning of the attitudes of the material and immaterial cultural heritage in the past, present, and future. The transtemporal relevance of this comparison stands by the essential question that pierces through the epochs: Are we continuing to romanticize Romanticism itself?

For the exhibition curated by Elena Sudakova at Pushkin House, Ridnyi developed a newspaper-like leaflet that presents a Wikipedia-style introduction of Mazepa’s character, somewhat mocking the possibility of arriving at truth through describing him. It is framed similarly to Kokoschka’s illustrations. Both artists emphasize temporality rather than constancy, the relativism in the narrative construction. Visitors to the exhibition could take home a copy of the one-page agitprop publication. Ridnyi’s video enlivens the message with new media energy and breathes dynamism into a rhetorical battle.

While Kokoschka challenged the use of folklore in reaffirming traditional values, Ridnyi has refused to take a side, to choose one or the other portrayal of Mazepa as more probable and outrightly highlighted the subjective nature of any possible reading and interpretation of the character. Both artists’ works boldly subvert the romanticization of generic conventions, “bastardizing” their elevation to the level of sanctity. They did not need to invent the methodology from scratch; rather, they employed ancient techniques of narrative speculation from rhapsodists of the deep past. With equally vivid energy, both challenged the norms of accepted discourse that preclude conformism to authorial position or its binary, agonistic opposition. Kokoschka dove into the psyche of his adolescent readers, offering them introspective agency in the face of the demanding regulations of the world around them. At the same time, Ridnyi emphasizes the artificiality of the restriction in the political stances on Hetman Mazepa offered to the passive spectator as if from a menu of acceptable positions. The works differ in style, but they are comparable in their seeming attempts to subvert the essence of the respective narrative in affirmation of the sociopolitical order and naturalness of agonism.

The creative impulse is comparable to how the ancient Greek rhapsodists, for example, wildly rendered folk stories and their characters. We have so many versions of Heracles, Dionysus, and other mythological characters, sometimes radically different depending on the author narrating them. Paradoxically, the creation of a myth was a demystifying gesture. The multiplicity of possible versions and the constant introduction of new portrayals of characters and new readings of storylines prevented them from fossilization and invited the dynamic approach to the social identity–affirming lore. The eternal and static become impossible, while dynamism and change characterize the necessary reaction to essential change with the constant transformation of the community. Unlike the Romantic search for fundamental, unchangeable wisdom and permanent cultural codes embedded at the beginning of time, the rhapsodic attitude to rendering the story invites the propositions of reformation, vital critique, and opposition. In this spirit, Pushkin and Byron can be seen as creators of entirely different characters in parallel literary realities. This assumption counters the historizing attitude of Romanticism and redefines the scheme of approaching storytelling at large as narrative speculation or a field of essential, dynamic digressions.

Shaping collective political memory is essential to legitimize contemporary forms of universal imperialism and its primary adversary—a particular nationalism. While the weaponization of cultural heritage in the political struggle is ubiquitous, Ridnyi’s film epitomizes the critical function of narrative digression, namely subversion. “Subversion,” rooted in the Latin verb subvertere (to overthrow), refers to a process by which the values and principles of a system are contradicted or reversed to sabotage the established social order and its structures of power, authority, tradition, hierarchy, and social norms. Kokoschka and Ridnyi have approached subversion from opposite ends, but they both aimed to achieve the same effect of critical confusion in their respective audiences. Kokoschka challenged his client’s expectations by subverting the fairy-tale genre as a vessel in which to preserve bourgeois norms and values and instead focusing on the realness of the experience of growing up. This strategy sparked effective intergenerational agonism instead of creating repulsion for the abnormal and a reverence for conservative ideals—as was desired by the party that commissioned the work—thereby introducing a speculative artistic agency. Ridnyi has thrown off presumed determinacies of the correct or incorrect political position by subverting agonism itself, equalizing the perceived real and the possible speculative. While the approaches to the subject differ, both artists have focused on subverting the status quo by addressing the normalized in a way “that is just human nature” agonism. They transform the gesture into effective and potent criticism by making the sociopolitical construction and conditions of agony visible, registrable, and estranged.

Ridnyi’s video challenges the audience to step back from choosing sides—and to focus on dangerous oversimplifications as a fundamental source of naturalizing fiction. The Battle Over Mazepa, the first video in a planned trilogy, restages Romantic agonism and demonstrates its actuality in the present—against the backdrop of Russia’s war against Ukraine. It also reveals the tendency of contemporary art to reaffirm the subjective, oversimplified battlefronts through aestheticization—as in the case of Romantic legacies. Like the meme-banner holders in the video, the artist with a political agenda draws the frontiers to the agonistic battle lines, reaffirming the distinction between friend and enemy.

As David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky argue, Romanticism sanctified the nation-state as the church waned.⁴ It legitimized the state as an absolute arbiter of ethical and moral judgement. As such, it materialized a political imaginary. While French philosopher Auguste Comte insisted on the “rationalization” of society through the nation-state, Romanticism in fact remythologized society anew.

The work of Kokoschka critically addresses the emerging bourgeois conservatism, which aimed to rearrange society’s new boundaries of restrictions as the power of the church vanished—and in that, to tighten the screws on the imagination of possible alternatives from the early childhood period. In challenging his commissioner’s intention so radically, Kokoschka revealed the intention behind the supposedly apolitical gesture of producing a piece of “edutainment” (educating entertainment) for children. Ridnyi, in his interrogation of our permacrisis-branded contemporaneity, spearheads our time’s burning ontological cleavage—normalization of the subjectivity of political agonism, in which the temporary arrangements and interpretations are communicated by power and perceived by the public through the lenses of multiple media channels as natural, eternal, and unchanging. This is among the feeders of the resurgence of new fascisms and other forms supposedly abandoned by the “never again” humanism’s progress, abominations as the solution offered is “final” and “simple.” The Wikipedia-style leaflet in the exhibition at Pushkin House and the one-line-slogan carriers in the video embody the rising number of these agents of further naturalization of agonistic battle.

The problems Kokoschka’s and Ridnyi’s works address intend to reaffirm the stance of historical truism beyond critique, nullifying or conveniently ignoring the context in which it emerged and removing it from the contested speculation space. Such conservative discourse contributes to the problem of “romanticizing Romanticism”—not actively challenging its positionality within “the greatest of eras” and as the source of nostalgic pride—which continues to emphasize the ethereal materiality of ghosts from the past. At the same time, it naturalizes and fixates as permanent the dynamic boundaries of agonistic struggles, presenting figures and ideas about the good and the bad as ontological categories, though they are, in fact, products of the sociopolitical context of their time and their power relations. The subversion and “bastardization” of Romantic tradition through critical speculation, as seen in Kokoschka’s drawings and Ridnyi’s video, show us a potent example of shaking up normality at a moment when reality starts to appear everlasting, futureless, and disjointed from its surroundings. Both works, though separated by age, demonstrate a successful multimedia address of the transhistorical challenge. Amplifying the messages conveyed in these works and further igniting the spread of their approaches is relevant in any time—but specifically in the present.

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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 beyond the regulated boundaries of “systems” and borders, then the late 1990s marked a shift toward individual actions, enclosure within interiority, and exploration of the body as fragile and the subject as damaged and violated. In the meantime, the earlier emphasis on text, factorgraphic strategies, ephemeral “fixations,” and interventions had been replaced by the newly available medium of video and multimedia installation often involving theatrically infused live performances focused on the body as a site of antagonism toward the social and the political, tout court. The body in these actions served as the tragic locus of the irreparable schism between nature and culture, as a site of technologically inflicted hyper-alienation. This transition from collective actions and interventions to solo performances and video was partly a reaction to the sociopolitical transformations taking place in Armenia in the late 1990s. Fermented amid social and political upheaval, these transformations were experienced as violent and tectonic.

The wild and unregulated free-market reforms of the early 1990s prepared the ground for the rise of the new oligarchy in Armenia while the Karabakh war with neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenia’s 1994 victory inflamed nationalism. Yet it was another political event that triggered a shift in general sentiment, from post-Soviet optimism to imminent disillusionment. On October 27, 1999, several gunmen entered the Armenian parliament, held the deputies and ministers hostage for hours, and subsequently killed the popular, newly elected prime minister and speaker along with six other political figures. In the aftermath of this carnage, which was almost fully televised since the session of parliament taking place at the time of the terror attack was being broadcast live on national television, president Robert Kocharyan usurped political power (which he would retain until the bloody crackdown on oppositional protests in 2008). The 1999 parliament shooting was experienced by contemporary Armenian artists as a cataclysmic event, one heralding the end of post-Soviet aspirations for the construction of a democratic nation-state led by a progressive liberal government. Politically and economically, the newly sovereign state promoting free-market reforms and liberal democracy had given way to a convenient marriage between ethnocentric nationalism and neoliberalism. The official cultural policy of the 1990s of representing Armenia as an ancient yet modern and progressive nation began to fade in the face of “one nation, one culture” rhetoric under the umbrella of Christianity, an identity that became both ideologically expedient and commercially lucrative for the new nationalist elites. Contemporary artists were relegated to the margins of this new social order, foreclosing their embrace of dominant social and cultural narratives or their artistic participation within the country’s official institutions. If, in 1998, the artist known as Sev could have an exhibition at the National Assembly triggering art critic Vardan Jaloyan’s anxiety over art’s identification with power, after the 1999 parliament shootings, the relationship between state institutions and dominant cultural narratives on the one hand and the contemporary art scene on the other could be defined only in negative terms.¹

Meanwhile, the late 1990s were also marked by a triumph of postmodern mediatization of the public sphere, where the world onscreen came to be perceived as more real than the social reality, which was replete with contradictions.² In contrast to the deceptive spectacle of media representations, contemporary artists used the technology of video to signify resistance and “truth.” Here, the performing body being screened for display served as a conduit to an authentic reality, one beneath and beyond the cultural “screen.” Video as a medium of subversion, truth, and exposure in Armenia had its roots in the early 1990s in the form of sexually explicit content on VHS tapes.³ The proliferation of video was technically possible because the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) imported cameras, DVD players, TV monitors, and projectors, which it then made available to artists, while the theatrical and ritualistic pathos of performative practices found nourishment in theatrically infused multimedia performances by New York–based Iranian Armenian artist Sonia Balassanian, whose aesthetics were promoted by ACCEA’s theater department.

The triangulation of theatrical video-performance, the conception of the fragile body as a site of violence, and the belief in art as a means of resistance was crystalized in works made by David Kareyan between 1999 and 2007. From ritualistic sacrifice (Dead Democracy, 1999) to eating the victim’s flesh (Eucharist-450, 2000) and splitting bones with an electric saw (Gastritus, 2002), Kareyan displayed the body, often naked, on a video monitor set among incongruent materials such as earth, plants, bones, and fleece to signify the subject’s alienation and estrangement from nature (fig. 1). Kareyan’s work of this period counterposed art’s promise of de-alienation with the false sublation of alienation within the social sphere—where the technologies of the cultivation of the self in a society in which standardized consumerist desires and behaviors promised fulfillment but instead mass-produced conformity. These social technologies of desire shaped the body as an image of power (in edified, upstanding form), while at the same time, subjugated it. The effects of political control and consumerism were inscribed on the body of the normative subject, whose complicit performance of militarism, patriotism, and conservative morality naturalized patriarchal domination. These ideologies produced autoerotic subjects whose frustrated desire could only be expressed through a primordial return to mud (The World Without You, 1999) or invoked through the impossible return to murder and incest (Sweet Repression of Ideology, 2000).

The culmination of these series of videos and performances was Kareyan’s No Return (subtitled Suicide for Eternal Life, Oral Hysteria, Speech Capability Paid [for] by Madness) of 2003.⁴ Realized in collaboration with curator Eva Khachatryan, this three-channel video installation was composed of a central screen showing a Bill Viola-esque video of Kareyan in a white nightshirt digitally superimposed on fire (in different versions of the work, the images on the screens vary) and two side screens showing montages of found footage from documentary films and world news reports of various recent turbulent events superimposed on politically charged signs and words. An audio piece composed of electronic bits and lyrics by early twentieth-century Armenian poet and writer Yeghishe Charents played in reverse accompanied the videos, as did a live performance involving seven female figures, most of whom were members of the punk band Incest, dressed up in hooded black gowns and drumming on tin plates and logs (fig. 2).  

These works echoed Sonia Balassanian’s multimedia theatrical performances of the same period, which were infused with myth and ritual. Balassanian’s performances, in turn, referenced Armenian ecclesial traditions, enacting victimhood, sacrifice, and various rituals of domination and subjugation (Shadows of Dusk and Collapse of Illusions, 2000; and There Might Have Been, 2003, ACCEA). The construction of a total environment that overwhelmed the audience with its production of affect combined video projection, ready-made objects, voice, music, performance, and other media and encompassed the entirety of the viewer’s sensorial sphere, a Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts. Often, such as in Collapse of Illusions, this total environment also functioned as a grand theatrical setting that accommodated other artists’ performances (including those by David Kareyan, Karine Matsakyan, Sona Abgaryan, and Diana Hakobyan, among others). Collapse of Illusions was formed through multiple discrepant activities performed by subjects in solipsistic self-enclosure and constituted a negative side of reality in which everything was as it is in the social world but nonetheless dysfunctional, futile, and completely deplete of time and context. Sewing, knitting, hammering nails, dancing, and “cooking” book pages in tar were performed in a dystopic, atemporal landscape littered with media images, objects, artworks, and debris.

Several artists in the early 2000s produced videos and performances exploring the body as a fragile yet subversive locus of sexuality, eroticism, and desire. Tigran Khachatryan’s videos pursue sexually explicit content montaged onto signifiers of youth subcultures and remixed with ready-made references to film and pop culture. Repetitive and futile masturbatory gestures—or their metaphorical representation through juxtaposition of image and rhythm—often follow the structure of male orgasm (such as in the “explosive scene” of the gas stove burning and being extinguished in Romeo, 2003). This image of the virile subject appears alongside the figure of a male subcultural antihero as an average representative of a bored and jaded generation (Stakler, 2004). In a 2002 performance titled Bread and Cheese, filmed in the medieval monastery Ayrivank, the artist, dressed as a punk soccer fan mimicking a soccer player from the Turkish national team (Umit Davalan), approached a miniature football field lined with white paint, sat in front of the camera, and proceeded to eat bread and cheese (fig. 3). As viewers of the recording of the performance soon realize, the camera positioned in front of the artist was not filming the performance but rather displaying a soccer game. The action of eating bread and cheese evokes a common Armenian adage that one must eat a lot of bread and cheese in order to become an adult.⁵ The saying is often used in a derogatory sense to indicate that someone needs to grow up or mature. This “rite of passage” experienced by the young punk recalls an ironically enacted oedipal patricide that took place at a site of patriarchal authority, that is, on church grounds. However, instead of assuming the father’s place after the symbolic murder, Khachatryan’s male subject remains forever juvenile.

If the male body in Khachatryan’s work is at times virile and sexually provocative (such as in his series of “Garage” film productions including Romeo, 2003; Theodicy, 2005; and Entertate, 2010),⁶ and at other times bored and indifferent, in Harutyun Simonyan’s video performances, it is fragile and vulnerable. Simonyan’s performances are framed in a decontextualized and compressed space in which the naked artist assumes a fetal position onscreen—as in a womb (Untitled, 2001). Simonyan’s naked body dances, slips, and tumbles in a room covered with black linoleum and smeared with Vaseline (Untitled, 2003), it falls asleep (Sleep, 2001), and it performs the feminine work of sewing and attempts to don a feminine dress that is too small (Untitled, 2001; fig. 4). The sexualized male body is masochistically exposed to voyeuristic scopophilia as the audience “infiltrates” the artist’s private space. Yet, masochistic exhibitionism and exposure here do not unambiguously grant the viewer visual control over the fragile body; the subject is also protected and sheltered by the screen/womb in the fantasy of a return to its maternal origin. In Lusine Davidyan’s video Untitled (2003), the embryonic state unfolding on the TV monitor is not a prelapsarian fantasy of the whole and undivided subject but rather the horror of certain and predetermined death. An abstracted form of a body flickers onscreen while a black text on the white wall behind it issues the verdict “Embryonic Death Embedded in Your Body,” echoing the lyrics of heavy metal band Slayer: “Embryonic death, / Embedded in your brain.” The temporality of Simonyan’s work is a regression to the ahistorical and pre-subjective time before birth, to the mother’s body, while Davidyan’s is that of the anterior future—that is, of a future that will have happened in the past.

If the above-described works confine the body to a claustrophobic self-enclosure refusing any relationality or “outside,” other artists of the same generation explore the intersubjective dimension of bodily communication. In Sona Abgarian’s videos of the early 2000s, friendship is conceived as a medium of intersubjective exchange in which play and violence, communication and its failure, appear as rudimentary forms of sociality. In Untitled (2001), two female subjects (the artist and her friend, Astghik Melkonyan) assume a four-legged position and engage in a play of love and envy, empathy and violence, as they circle, hug, and bite each other (fig. 5).

Diana Hakobyan’s videos of the early 2000s position the active body as disruptive to the induced passivity of media spectacle and consumerism as she engages with the deconstruction of the rhetoric of mediatized images and social clichés. In I Can’t Believe in Your Dreams (2002), the artist is seen skipping rope in a series of close-ups (of her face, abdomen, chest, or legs), while her action is rhythmically interrupted by shots of a hammer smashing panes of glass inscribed with social ideals such as “Collaboration,” “Productivity,” “Success,” and “Imagination” (fig. 6). In another, the artist boxes against a pane of glass covered in illegible scribbles in red paint. This figure of the female artist as warrior against social clichés and consumerist desires can be traced to an earlier work by Karine Matsakyan. In 1995, as part of her solo exhibition Triumph of the Consumer at Charlie Khachatryan Gallery, Matsakyan walked into a butcher’s shop with a toy gun and “fired” at hanging flesh (Suicidal Tendencies, 1995).

Anna Barseghian’s 1999 performative photograph taken in a men’s bathroom in the Grand Théâtre de Genève intervenes in the sexual division of intimate spaces. The image shows the artist dressed in a black ceremonial costume, like that worn by a widow or a theatrical performer (fig. 7). She is standing still and upright at a urinal, her back to the viewer. The contrast between the artist’s stern and austere appearance and the “hooliganism” of the act, the assumption of a phantasmal phallus by a conservatively dressed female figure, juxtaposes two incongruent notions, thus estranging the social reproduction of sexuality as it is conducted through the demarcation of segregated sights and signs. 

Up until the early 2000s, these actions were not overtly framed as feminist—with the exception of Barseghian’s work, among a few others.⁷ A shift in framework took place in about 2002–3, when Sonia Balassanian on the one hand and Austrian curator Hedwig Saxenhuber (who was visiting Yerevan) on the other, encouraged an explicitly feminist framing of women artists’ work concerned with the social reproduction of sexual divisions, gender roles and anti-patriarchal manifestations, and the body. The feminist exhibitions Women’s City curated by Arpine Tokmajyan, Heriqnaz Galstyan, and Narine Zolyan in 2004 and Rocks Melting in the Depth of the Earth in 2004 and Women’s City by Eva Khachatryan in 2005 were testament to this shift toward revealing explicitly feminist concerns through a language and discourse of difference and identity characteristic of US third-wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. First displayed at the festival Rocks Melting in the Depth of the Earth, artist and musician Tsomak’s video juxtaposes her frantically dancing naked body with a video of a dancing stripper filmed in a club in Yerevan, whereas Sona Abgaryan’s work shows the artist buttoning her blouse, taking it on and off in awkward movements, as a first-person account of violence against women runs in the subtitles.

Astghik Meklonyan’s work Bokhcha (2004) likewise engaged with traditional feminine roles and tasks. But this engagement was not guided by a subversive reperformance of sexual roles. Rather, it was carried out through an exaggerated over-performance in which the female subject became the object of her own labor. In Bokhcha, the artist’s body was wrapped and de-subjectivized and barely visible among other colorful and patterned wraps as she moved slowly through them (fig. 8). These wraps made of blankets and sheets functioned as signifiers of the household labor undertaken by women, while also evoking the experience of displacement and migration. Indeed, “bokhcha,” a Turkish word assimilated in Armenian slang, designates a self-made wrap that immigrants, nomads, travelers, and the displaced use to carry their belongings.

The dominant paradigm of Armenian performative art practices in the late 1990s and early 2000s could be construed as one of a critical deconstruction of socially imposed gender roles, sexual identities, and forms of subjectivization. In this context, Azat Sargsyan’s performative interventions propose another strategy: not to rearticulate the body, identity, and subject in order to subvert dominant discourses but rather to annihilate the very material upon which this ideology conducts its wicked schemes—that is, the subject itself. In Azat (free) Hanging on Freedom Square on the Independence Day (2000) the artist hung upside-down from a streetlight (fig. 9). The title of the action plays with the artist’s name Azat which in Armenian means freedom and is repeated in the name of the iconic Freedom square where the demonstrations for Armenia’s independence took place throughout the late Soviet period. According to the artist, through the action he was commenting on independent Armenia’s actual dependence upon larger geopolitical forces.⁸ A photograph shows the artist anthropologically opposite the human orientation and iconographically in contrast to the statue of Armenian composer Alexander Spendiaryan in the background on the right. This reversal or repositioning as a means of annihilation of the subject was performed in Welcome (1999), which took place at the exhibition After the Wall in Stockholm in 2000 and in 2002 at the São Paulo Biennial.⁹ This time, the artist positioned his body horizontally as a doormat and lied there for two hours to mark the entrance to the exhibition space. This willful self-objectification as a lowly, abject doormat beneath visitors’ feet marked a desire for the obliteration of subjectivity, a desire that reached its extreme in Azat’s subsequent performances involving death and the politics of its commodification.

In Welcome to Armenia, Museum Under Heaven (2003) commissioned for the exhibition L’environement du corps génétiquement modifiable, curated by Barseghian and Nazareth Karoyan, the artist studied the economy of cemeteries, especially the real-estate speculations through which municipal burial grounds in Yerevan spread toward residential neighborhoods. They had become “last destinations” for expat Armenians who lived abroad but dreamt of being buried in their homeland. Azat showed funerary accessories across the city, including a guide to the cemetery “Armenia,” placing the country itself as a cemetery under heaven. The artist, wearing a black garment with a white painted inscription “Welcome,” was photographed next to funerary statues and tombs (fig. 10). His identification of Armenia as a place of death exposed the commodification of this myth and positioned it as an object of touristic consumption.¹⁰ Continuing identification with death and dying, this subject was finally obliterated in the impossible act of witnessing one’s own funeral (the Gyumri Biennial of 2008¹¹). 

Azat’s works recall the 1980s practices of unofficial artists of the Soviet Union, for whom disappearance and death became a means of escaping the watchful eyes of the Soviet apparatus. But, paradoxically, this self-annihilation was also a road to absolute freedom (“Azat” in Armenian means “free”). Enacted in the 2000s, Azat’s anachronistic dissidence was a reminder of the ghostly reverberations of a world that had supplied negative content for the conception of art as a free space for dreaming, a conception formative for contemporary art in Armenia and performative practices within it. This world was the disappearing landscape of Soviet modernity. In the 2000s, when identification with the social context could no longer be secured, the artist’s social function could no longer be affirmed. To be sure, amid conditions of increasing alienation, the imaginary world of artistic creations became a shelter of sorts, a compensatory mechanism, while the artist became ever more marginalized in the context of rampant nationalism and neoliberalism. The return of Armenia’s first president Levon Ter-Petrosyan, a liberal democrat, to politics in 2007 opened up a space for renewed participation in politics and public life for artists, a space that was soon to be violently shut down as the outgoing president Kocharyan announced martial law and, on March 1, 2008, issued a deadly crackdown of the opposition.

Editors’ note: Read the Introduction and Part I of this series here, and Part II here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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Performances of Politics in a Nation-State (1991­–98)

Armenian performative practices and “art actions”¹in 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 of the everyday, intervening in “closed systems” of communication, overidentifying with or ironically repeating forms and procedures of the newly constituted liberal democratic state after the collapse of the USSR and its official rituals, and demarcating institutional boundaries of art. In the maelstrom of rapid transformations set in motion by the dissolution of the old world, many artists embraced the newfound quasi-anarchic freedom, the reestablishment of communication with the outside world, and the possibility of participating in the construction of the new world and new state. In the mid-1990s, for the first time, contemporary art from the Republic of Armenia was presented abroad under the aegis of its ministry of culture.²In this context, the artistic avant-garde largely positioned itself as the self-appointed vanguard of the culture of the new state as opposed to a resistant subculture. Its agenda often (but not always) coincided with that of the cultural politics of the new republic—to represent Armenia as a progressive nation with an ancient culture that was finally joining the progressive and free family of nations on the international stage.

The 3rd Floor ultimately dissolved in 1994 in part because of a crisis of resistance³but also because of the need to institutionalize, which came in conflict with the movement’s inherent anti-institutional stance, paving the way for a generation of artists who saw themselves as the avant-garde of the independent republic. This generation, which made its collective entry to the Armenian contemporary art scene in 1994–95 under the name ACT,⁴conceived of the the artist as the engineer of a new world—and promoted the artistic notion of a “pure creativity.”⁵This term denotes a conceptual procedure for cleansing artwork of subjective, material, institutional, and other determinations not integral to creativity as well as adopting concrete strategies for making the process of doing so visible through “fixation (inscription)” (documenting everyday objects and gestures), “intervention” (intervening in public spaces or “closed systems”), “inspection” (carrying out explorations and studies of sites, systems, and spheres), and “display” (presenting the results of the former procedures as works of art). At the same time, ACT understood art and the political sphere of the state as separate institutions, each constituted by its own procedural mechanisms, and collectively aimed to demystify both.

Beginning in 1993, David Kareyan, a key member of the group, was working on a project he called “POLIT-ART,” which involved three strategies borrowed directly from liberal democratic political practices—referendum, demonstration, and agitation—and was realized as collective actions upon the formation of ACT a year later. For the exhibition Act of 1995 in the Ex-Voto Gallery, Kareyan prepared leaflets titled “POLIT-ART,” “Referendum,” “Agitation” and “Demonstration,” and “Actayin hosank” (Actual stream). After using a megaphone to announce these same words through an open window, he threw the leaflets at the audience gathered below (fig. 1). He enacted a “referendum” the same year, in January 1995, at the exhibition of Armenian art held at the Museum Bochum in Germany.⁶Art Referendum incorporated a transparent ballot box labeled “referendum.” An archival photograph reproduced in several newspapers and periodicals shows the artist standing behind the box holding a pen in one hand and casting his vote with the other. The process appears to have been carried out with the utmost seriousness as the artist’s gaze is fixed upon the action he is performing (fig. 2). Viewers were likewise invited to mark and cast a ballot. Finally, in his seminal action Art Demonstration, which he undertook with ACT and other artists as part of Yerevan-Moscow: The Question of the Ark, an exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Yerevan, Kareyan enacted democratic expression in the form of an artistic action. This much-discussed work is a perfect example of ACT’s identification with and use of political procedures integral to liberal democracy within an artistic form of “pure creativity.”⁷.

On July 12, 1995, during the opening of Yerevan-Moscow, and exactly one week after the constitutional referendum in Armenia in which the first constitution of the independent state was approved, ACT, together with several other artists, marched along the main avenue in Yerevan (fig. 3).⁸They covered an artistically defined public space—the area between the statue of early twentieth-century Armenian modernist painter Martiros Saryan (1880–1972), which was also the site of early youth exhibitions in the early 1980s, and the Modern Art Museum. Approximately twenty people carried banners with slogans in Armenian and English, most of which were written in black letters on a white background, calling for “Interventions into Systems,” “World Integration,” “Polit-Art,” “Decentralization,” “Market Relations in Art and Economy,” “Realization,” “No Art,” “Art Referendum,” “New State, Art, Culture,” and “Demythologization”; issuing demands such as “Expel the Information Monsters from Rationality”; proclaiming that “Every Small Mistake Can Result in Big Catastrophes”; and asserting that “Creativity Will Save Humanity.” After reaching the museum, their final destination, the artists hung the banners on the wall as part of Yerevan-Moscow. In this action, the politics of “pure creativity” directly met the pure creativity of politics, as the slogans were both formal interventions in the art institution as well as manifestations of democratic proceduralism in the form of a public demonstration.⁹

ACT’s affirmative strategies of overidentification with the political forms of the liberal democratic state through performative actions could be considered unique in contemporary art in Armenia in terms of relating affirmatively to the state and its institutions. As opposed to this, the gestures of ritualistic mimicry by older-generation conceptual artist Grigor Khachatryan (born 1952)—most of which were ironic and often grotesque—related to the mechanisms of the constitution of power and authority. Khachatryan’s work renders political institutions simply as forms through which power and authority are enacted as and through ritual. He performatively assumed “absolute power” through self-mandated award ceremonies (the “Grigor Khachatryan award”), self-aggrandizing declarations (“You are within the radius of the sexual rays of Grigor Khachatryan”), pseudo-institutions (“Center for Planning Accidents”), ceremonial renewing of street plaques ( “Groghneri poghots” or “Writers’ Street”), and “official meetings” (hosting then Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili in the room specially designated for official meetings as part of the Armenian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011). The fictitious persona created by the artist “cannibalizes” the artist’s body as raw material and uses it in repetitive rituals. In the Grigor Khachatryan award ceremony (“tested” in 1974 and held occasionally since 1990),¹⁰there are a minimum of three  “Grigor Khachatryans”—firstly, the name denotes the artist-author who conceived of the honor; secondly, it appears in the self-referential title of the award; and finally, it is evoked in the trophy itself, which is in the form of the artist’s body—enabling the awardee to literally hold Grigor Khachatryan in their arms (fig. 4). Khachatryan’s actions are not confined to the rituals that constitute officialdom. Indeed, for many years, with humor and irony, he has been rendering everyday mythologies strange (television interventions on Ar TV such as the series City, which he produced with Suren Ter-Grigoryan in the 1990s), deeming national myths banal (Vanna Lich, Gyumri Biennale, 1998), and depicting male friendship as a fantasy of recovering a primordial and infantile state of jouissance (Aratez, with Norayr Ayvazyan, 1993). Khachatryan’s gestures are repetitive and often tautological, a logic that is constitutive of power for its own sake. As sarcastic and antiheroic as his performances might seem, his signature laughter, which often accompanies them, invokes the figure of a joker as truth-teller in the face of power, as a romantic whose heroism is precisely in his antiheroism.

Performative iteration as an intervention into institutional systems, combined with the conception of the artist as an itinerant whose role is to demarcate the boundaries of art’s permissibility characterizes several actions conceived by a loose group of conceptual artists in the mid-1990s. Initially affiliated with the activities of New York–based Iranian Armenian artist Sonia Balassanian (born 1942) in Yerevan since 1993 and ultimately with the foundation of the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) carried out by Balassanian and her husband, Edward Balassanian, in 1995, artists Karen Andreassian, Ara Hovsepyan, Samvel and Manvel Baghdasaryans, and Gagik Charchyan organized an unofficial intervention in the Tbilisi Biennial of 1996. The Biennial coincided with the artists’ schism with Balassanian and became a tacit protest against ACCEA, which organized the official Armenian Pavilion.¹¹Inspired by the rhetorical question posed by scandalous Russian artist Alexander Brener: “Why haven’t I been invited to this exhibition?” (“Почему меня не взяли на эту выставку?”), artists went to the biennial with so-called geopolitical cards (also the title of the intervention), carrying their own name tags along with those of famous artists and acting as representatives of a fictitious foundation called “Local Global.” On the one hand, the intervention voiced a locally articulated discontent with ACCEA’s collaboration with artists other than the group through a construction of a fictitious and situational counter-institution;¹²on the other, it brought to the surface a key problematic for post-Soviet Armenian artists—that of the desire to participate in a global art world through a language and means characterizing conceptual art.¹³It is especially the latter aspect that informed their expedition the next year to the German city of Kassel.

In 1997, the same group of artists—a collective that was situational rather than long-standing or cohesive—organized an unofficial intervention in the authoritative documenta X curated by Catherine David in Kassel (fig. 5). GEO-Kunst Expedition documented the artists’ journey from Yerevan to the exhibition. Once in Kassel, the group created a pseudo-official letterhead with the logo of the documenta, thus hijacking the institutional trademark. The artists posted copies of this fake stationery across the city with a call for the public to post messages or artworks on them. They conceived this intervention as providing a space on the stationery of the prestigious art event to post a message or an artwork, so that anyone could claim participation in the documenta. The letterhead thus acted as a sort of  parasitic institution created by the uninvited guests. Thus, the Armenian artists were inserting themselves into the global contemporary art context that had allegedly bypassed them.¹⁴This self-insertion was understood quite literally as the artists made sure to be photographed with David and to have the curator perform as an “artist” in the unofficial documenta by having her sign their fake letterhead. For a moment, the unofficial artists and official curator changed places.

All the examples discussed here point to a shift in late Soviet period discourse, aesthetics, and political attitude in performative artistic practices in Armenia. If the unofficial artists of the perestroika avant-garde conceived of their actions in terms of resistance toward official institutions, the artists in the early years of independence positioned themselves affirmatively in relation to the newly evolving state and its cultural discourses. They often did so through actions, performances, and artistic gestures that mimicked state rituals and forms of democratic participation.

The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

Editors’ note: Read the Introduction and Part I of this series here, and Part III here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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In May 1988 unofficial artists from across the Soviet republics gathered in Narva, Estonia, for what would be one of the last Soviet art festivals and yet one of the first such events to celebrate experimental performance art.¹The Festival of Art “Narva-88,” as it was called, was held on the threshold of the Soviet empire at Narva Castle, the Estonian castle fortress facing the Ivangorod Fortress—its Russian counterpart across the Narva River—and on the beach by the Baltic Sea, which surrounds the country to the north and west. By this time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s launch of perestroika (restructuring) reforms to promote economic “acceleration” had waned into stagnation as glasnost (openness), the promotion of cultural expression, made way for sovereignty claims throughout the Soviet republics. Held against a backdrop of dissident mobilizations ranging from the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in February 1988 to a series of environmentalist independence campaigns in the Baltics in 1986–87, Narva became a flash point in the lead-up to the empire’s collapse.²

One local paper described the large-scale, mixed media assemblage constructed on the lawn near the castle fortress as “installations filled with expression and sarcasm—human statues in wrestling poses tightly bandaged with strips of fabric, as if trying to escape from their binds, and next to them, a broken-down bus waiting dejectedly and hopelessly—the desire for action turned into inaction.”³ Sick Bus and its accompanying figures were created by Lia Shvelidze (born 1959) with other members of the unofficial Georgian art collective—the Marjanishvilebi.⁴ The asssemblage was the group’s first major work in an international public Soviet forum.⁵ Incorporating local found materials, the defunct Soviet bus parked in the castle yard was wrapped in cheap medical bandages, presented as not only a monument to wounded or arrested progress, but also a site of complex and conflicted feelings. The human figures captured a mix of rage, sarcasm, and raucous joy, expressions that were, in turn, concealed by the bandages.

Moreover, Sick Bus, as a metaphor for the stalled Soviet economy, seemed to serve as a counter-monument in its sideward glace across the Russian-Soviet and European borders to The Point Neuf Wrapped (1975–85) by  Bulgarian-born Paris-based artists Christo (1935–2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009). However, this critique of monumentality not only envisioned the specter of Soviet collapse, but also, more crucially, exposed the uncertainty of socialist belonging, a duality made palpalable in the uncomfortable conjunction between the work’s experimental form and its staging amid the official festival environment of state-sanctioned collectivity and optimism. Literally put under wraps, the mock-monument in the yard of the fortress under the banners of the Soviet festival drew viewers’ attention to the surface of its components—the texture of overlapping bandages. The symbolic object of the broken-down Soviet bus was transformed into a textural sculpture—a form that took shape in the contours of the cheap fabric covering it. In contrast to the official festival’s form, the installation represented an experimental and improvisational practice—figures suspended between political and social worlds—exposing the space of transition through the sensuous surface of the forms and the range of conflicted and muted emotions they evoked.

Sick Bus also highlights the transition in artistic value during the late Soviet period, whereby unofficial art in the Soviet Union began to draw support in part from state funds. Yet as the inaugural Sotheby’s sale of unofficial Soviet artworks held only a few months later, in July 1988, suggests, experimental works were also already beginning to garner currency in a global marketplace—albeit their acquired value traded in Euro-American fantasies of the “underground” scene of the almost “former East.”⁶Narva-88’s liminality between the collapsing Soviet empire and the accompanying social, economic, and ideological transitions exposes a diverse portrait of this complicated moment, one that prefigures the term “post-Soviet.”

In our current moment, narratives seeking to explain Putin’s violent invasion of Ukraine have raised necessary skepticism with regard to the idea of “post-Soviet.” Following a question set in motion since the dissolution on December 26, 1991, as to whether the “post-” in “post-Soviet” should also be read as “postcolonial,” the invasion has both confirmed that narrative and, at the same time, somewhat paradoxically revealed a persistent tendency to envision the region homogeneously, conflating Soviet with Russian—and Soviet society with an impenetrable ideological and cultural Cold War gaze. In the 1990s, “post-” marked a hard break—the rupture of a geopolitical, economic, and ideological worldview that Francis Fukuyama has described in the totalizing idiom of the “end of history.”⁷ But this moment should have instead called for a passionate rewriting. Staged amid a messy and uncertain moment on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, Narva-88 exposes the diversity and complexity of this space-time. It asks what would it look like to speak of the collapse not from the vantage of “post-,” but instead as a transitional moment that forged radically new modes and logics of belonging, violent rupture, and flourishing from within multilingual, aesthetically and culturally diverse, and affectively conflicted spaces that shaped the transition. It complicates a Euro-American vision of the Soviet Union as a homogeneous political and social mass located in a Slavic-Russian metropolitan center. It questions how one can document the sociopolitical transition from the indeterminacy and uncertainty of the present moment of its unfolding—as opposed to from the finality connoted by “post-” or the ethno-cultural homogeneity suggested by “Russian”—to the illumination of a set of complicated attachments to Sovietness. This essay seeks to open one such vantage by exploring Narva-88 as the site of experimental performances of alternative logics of belonging that both precede and exceed the so-called post-Soviet.

While many studies of performance in the context of late Soviet neo-avant-garde art have focused primarily on Russian and male artists—from the Mitki to the Moscow Conceptualists—Narva-88 illuminates the liveliness of the Soviet art scene in the late 1980s beyond the Russian metropolitan centers of Moscow and Leningrad. As Kyrgyz artist Gulnara Kasmalieva (born 1960) remembers, the festival’s guest list took shape through personal connections she made on Soviet-funded trips through the Caucasus and during her tenure in Estonia for studies in printmaking in 1987, exposing more broadly how informal networks, seminars, and exchanges animated connections across the republics over the course of the 1970s and 1980s.⁸

Narva-88 also marks the heyday of the unofficial art collective and of performance art broadly speaking—blending installation environments and performative actions carried out by individual and collective bodies. The festival was attended by members of the Georgian Marjanishvilebi, the Armenian Third Floor group, several Belarusian groups—Forma, Kvadrat (the Square), and Belarusian Climate—and the infamous Russian Mitkis. Artists exhibiting at Narva-88 who went on to have solo careers in the mid-1990s in installation, performance, and video art in addition to Shvelidze and Kasmalieva include Mamuka Japharidze (born 1962), Niko Tsetskhladze (born 1959), Mamuka Tsetskhladze (born 1962), Oleg Timchenko (born 1957), Gia Rigvava (born 1956), Koka Ramishvili (born 1956), and Karlo Kacharava (1964–1994) from Georgia; Igor Kashkurevich (Ihar Kashkurevich, born 1957) and Ludmila Rusava (1954–2010) from Belarus; Arman Grigorian (born 1960) from Armenia; and Zhilkichi Zhakypov (born 1957) from Kyrgzstan, among others. Narva-88 also marked a pivotal moment in the development of improvisational performance, installation, and public art across the Soviet Union, building on movements staged in private apartments and squats or outside of the urban setting since the 1970s. Moreover, for the first time, it brought improvisational works manifest as collaborative actions orchestrated between collectives to an international public stage.

The organization of the official Soviet festival foregrounded the tension between waning attachments to the Soviet institutional form and the unofficial genres of installation and performance works staged there. While the festival organization in part reflected Kasmalieva’s personal connections to emerging unofficial collectives, the Estonian festival organizers also sent official invitations addressed to “national delegations”— the artist unions of the Kyrgyz, Georgian, Armenian, and Russian Soviet Socialist Republics (rather paradoxical given that many of the artists who attended were not affiliated with the official unions)—inviting them to a festival and two-day seminar on the problems of contemporary art. The festival program, held at Narva Castle, consisted of exhibitions and youth events. Lodging was provided for artists at the nearby youth summer camp – the Estonian International Youth Center—on the banks of the Baltic Sea. The cultural program for the festival included classical music concerts, rock concerts, literary readings, and a performance by the Estonian children’s choir. The seminar program included a series of lectures and discussions of problems in contemporary art and film screenings, including of the previously censored Andrei Rublev (1966) by Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986), signaling the increasing integration of unofficial culture into official forums during the late Soviet period.⁹

Official documents outline the general aims and structure of the festival. They announce the creation of a local archive in Narva for the promotion of “peace, ecology, and culture,” reflecting Cold War environmental campaigns that began under Nikita Khrushchev and called for a turn away from Stalinist industrialization and toward the new ideological frameworks of “friendship, ecology, and peace.” Narva-88 is described as a prazdnik, or holiday, celebration, and festival, a sentiment echoed in the youth summer-camp setting. The goals listed for the seminar include “the development of the new structures of the festival to form the basis of a new tradition” such as “festival design” and a study of the urban and social infrastructure of the festival.¹⁰Many of the activities, including youth choir performances, rock concerts, and film screenings, drew directly from the traditional Soviet festival playbook as did the lodging and official invitations. The works created in the seminar, which were largely improvisational and incorporated found materials, were required to be exhibited and then to become part of the primary collection of a Narva museum of contemporary art. In this way, Narva-88 made the festival genre—the development of festival traditions and social infrastructure—foundational to the creation of a contemporary art scene. The festival environment, in turn, played a broader role in generating experimental performance aesthetics, exemplifying a shift to bring experimental art into public spaces.

From late 1986 through the summer of 1987, a wave of environmental protests and indigenous land rights movements sprang up in the Baltics, motivated by increased ecological concerns following the catastrophic Chernobyl disaster and a series of Soviet industrial projects that created an influx of Russian workers to the region that further heightened social and cultural tensions.¹¹ Against the backdrop of these dissident mobilizations for territorial and cultural sovereignty in the late 1980s across the republics, Narva staged works that resonated with signs of the imminent dissolution of the Soviet empire. The festival thus at once emphasized the politics of the cultural turn through spectacles of the Soviet “good-life”—promoting Soviet optimism and friendly multinational relations—and called for the aesthetic renovation of contemporary unofficial art movements that mediated local desires for ecological preservation and cultural autonomy. Ecology and wildness served conjointly as recurring themes, political symbols, and methods driving the experimental art at Narva. Belarusian Climate described their art as an attempt to “convey the wild (dikii) humidity” of late Soviet life in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. “Here, in this territory, it feels a little bit colder, then hotter—that is, everything is unbearable. A small thing becomes hypertrophied due to this wild humidity. There is no comfort here.”¹² The Georgian Marjanishvilebi also called themselves dikie, or the wild ones, in a parodic reversal of the imperial Russian Orientalist imaginary of the “wild Caucasus.”¹³ For Kyrgyz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and painter Zhilkichi Zhakypov, wildness also invoked a connection to nature. For their installation, they constructed an artificial garden at the Narva castle: an abstract composition of grass, stones, and plastic bags filled with water laid around a circle cut into the grass.¹⁴

While the work was hailed as a “synthesis of the national and international,” as if echoing Soviet internationalist propaganda, Kasmalieva instead described her interest in the textures of the installation, which like Sick Bus, highlighted the sensuous and environmental dimensions of the work.¹⁵ For Kasmalieva, it illuminated the play of light reflecting off the water-filled bags and the contrast between the texture of the grass from the field and the stark geometric imprint of the cut circle that became visible when viewed from the castle above.¹⁶ Both the festival and natural environment at Narva shaped the sensuous experience of the encounter with these installations. Kasmalieva’s recuperation of the artifice of the “natural” installation, in turn, playfully subverted a Soviet image of an “authentic” Kyrgyz national art. Poised between a critique of Soviet industrialization and Orientalist imaginaries of the non-Russian republics, for the Belarusian, Georgian, and Kyrgyz artists, the wilds came to reclaim ecology as a site for unofficial art-making, cultural and ecological autonomy and the basis for a collaborative improvisational method.

One of the most captivating documentations of the festival wilds is recorded in a video of the event filmed by Belarusian filmmaker Yuri Igrusha (Jury Ihrusha, born 1963) and collected at the Narva Museum archive.¹⁷ The structure of the video itself echoes the official festival framework, with each “chapter” attributed to a national artist delegation. However, though the narrative follows this formal arrangement, Igrusha’s videography features experimental documentary film techniques, including sometimes jarring handheld camerawork, exaggerated close-ups, lengthy pan shots, and montage. Igrusha’s cinematography also captures the improvisational performances staged on the Baltic Sea beach next to the camp where the artists resided, a thirty-minute bus ride from the exhibition at the Narva Castle.

The montage sequence begins with a close-up of a JVC television, which zooms out to a wide-angle shot that situates the TV on the Baltic Sea beach.¹⁸The JVC television was one of the iconic foreign imports that gained popularity in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Its image here also prefigures the promotion of the medium of video art by “post-Soviet” development initiatives like Soros in the late 1990s through early 2000s. Belarusian artist Igor Kashkurevich (Ihar Kashkurevich), dressed in a black scarf painted with white crosses—a garment designed by Ludmila Rusava to evoke the Black Square (1915) by avant-garde painter Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935)—walks along the beach to greet the camera.¹⁹

The camera then cuts to a shot of three members of Belarusian Climate, who are buried feet-first in the sand, their naked upper torsos emerging from the sand—suspended in classical poses as if sculptures—as the fog from the sea rolls across their bodies. ²⁰

The next shot is an image of their bodies planted face down in the sand, and it cuts to a sand sculpture made by Kashkurevich of a woman’s body stretched across the beach. The camera pans—tracing the sand sculpture’s form against the evening light—and then cuts to morning, when it has been severed by a tractore. ²¹

Every evening, a military tractor patrolled the border, policing movement across European waters by night. Both the sand figure and the performance actions made by the artists’ bodies are staged on the tractor lines, which mark both the policing of the political border and the temporal transition from day to night. Belarusian Climate walks into the sea, naked, holding pododeialniki,or Soviet-made duvet covers, notable for their design, which features a rhomboidal hole in the center.²²

The rhomboidal hole seems at once to conjure a contorted vision of Malevich’s canonical avant-garde revolutionary form and to evoke the material tradition of Soviet manufacturing. The objects—the JCV television and pododeialniki—thus render cotemporaneous the global import and consumer product as they expose the artists’ bodies suspended in a complex set of desires: for a Soviet festival “good-life,” for global consumer products, and for the legibility of experimental performance on an international stage.

These artworks improvised visions of wilds that captured the dynamism of this transitional space and time, engaging found materials and collaborative performances that illuminated shifting border zones on the eve of dissolution. The natural landscape (the sand and sea), the liminal spaces of the fortress and beach, the margins of the Soviet empire, and the sociopolitical scene at this site of border policing across which allegedly only consumer products could circulate shaped the artworks around and through the political and social collapse. As one of the last Soviet festivals, Narva-88 not only challenges the finality of “post-,” its homogeneous portrait of the end of history, and the whitewashing of the Soviet empire. In its exploration of this transitional space and time—on this border zone at the eve of collapse—Narva also exposes how artists from Tbilisi, Minsk, Bishkek, and beyond drew on performance art to experiment with their own repertoires of aesthetic and political gesture. Narva-88 conjured the waning imaginary of Soviet-national art in the process of its unraveling, and in so doing, generated political and aesthetic openings—rhomboidal or otherwise—for the unruly collectivities that must succeed “post-.”

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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 art.” These practices were often not only symptomatic but also, at times, prognostic of broader sociopolitical developments in late-Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia.

The twenty years covered here—from 1987 to 2008—are conditionally demarcated as the period of transition from the late-Soviet to the post-Soviet condition (with an ideological implication of being a transition to liberal democracy)¹ and ultimately to a marriage of neoliberalism and nationalism in the 2000s. The political and cultural discourses of glasnost in the 1980s would herald the onset in the 1990s of market capitalism, with its “inhuman face” (in contrast to “socialism with a human face”)²combined with the construction of the liberal democratic nation-state on the ruins of Soviet modernity. However, in the later 1990s and throughout the 2000s, market capitalism and liberal democracy were decoupled, and late capitalism’s Armenian variant triumphed alongside the ideology of neoliberalism under the protective umbrella of political authoritarianism. This periodization, however, is not solely guided by political events. It also follows the internal development of performative practices as they unfolded within the complex contradictions and tensions of the late-Soviet and post-Soviet conditions. If in the late 1980s and throughout most of the 1990s, artists participated in the construction of a new state and in its cultural discourses through collective actions and interventions in the public sphere, in 1999–2008, with a few exceptions, they conducted solo performances and actions. If in the first instance, artist collectives laid claim to social participation and engagement, in the second, individual artists explored the embodied, sexed, damaged, and annihilated subject violated by political and social forces of control and repression.

As part of the explosion of political and cultural practices that challenged the officially sanctioned discourses, institutions, and narratives—and that encouraged a spirit of reformism licensed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformist agenda within the framework of perestroika and glasnost since the mid-1980s—performative gestures executed in the context of multimedia and multi-genre exhibitions therein formed within and in response to perestroika’s imperative of reforming official institutions from within.³Here, performative acts and actions came to signify unmediated communication between the artist and their public, an aspiration for the late-Soviet Armenian avant-garde artists. In their very origin, performative acts, as discreet as they may seem—whether Happenings and art actions in the late 1980s and 1990s or performance and video art in the late 1990s and 2000s—shared one fundamental characteristic: they were undertaken in opposition and resistance to dominant political and cultural discourses and narratives, even in moments when they adopted an overtly affirmative tone.⁴ The performative gesture became a necessary means for pointing toward and critically challenging the boundaries of institutions, disciplines, discourses, established cultural narratives, and dominant aesthetic regimes at a time when the relationship between the center and the margins of culture was shifting and unstable.Attached to the advent and institutionalization of semiofficial and nonofficial art in the late Soviet period (which in the 1990s came to be referred to as “contemporary art”)⁵and part of the broader context of overcoming the medium-bound imperatives of officially sanctioned art, performative practices carried with them the dilemmas and ambiguities characterizing late-Soviet and post-Soviet avant-gardes: the desire to remain marginal and resistant (even if political conditions were at times ripe for occupying “the center”), self-institutionalizing, and yet—espousing a quasi-anarchic anti-institutional rhetoric—adopting grand and absolute gestures that aimed to constitute their own artistic context as more real than reality itself and ultimately being formed by the negation of the Soviet historical experience. 

Part I

1980s: Resurrected Ghosts, Underground Heroes, and Saintly Saviors

The show “Happening,” which opened in Yerevan in 1982 and was curated by V. Tovmassyan, was an important show. Vigen Tadevossyan . . . presented a huge balloon that was constantly being filled with air. There was a wonderful poet named Belamuki. But focus was on two actors who, in a very strange way, resembled Salvador Dali and Picasso.

“To be honest, it was neither a happening nor a performance, but theatre directed by the sculptor Vardan Tovmassyan. I was not invited to the above-mentioned exhibition, and a month later decided to make a performance entitled “Exit to the city.” . . . For about an hour we were screaming texts edited from politically oriented newspapers and art magazines. The speech of Henry Igityan (the first and “irreplaceable” director of the Museum of Modern Art since 1972) that followed the performance was very typical of the times: “Our people do not need your experiments” (we performed both “Happening” and “Exit to the City” in his museum space). It meant that neither my friends nor I could have exhibitions there any more, not to mention at the Artists’ Union. We had to exhibit on the streets, at the conservatory, and the education worker’s house.”⁶—Arman Grigoryan

This quote from artist Arman Grigoryan’s recollection of the early to mid-1980s art scene in Yerevan is one of the very few published statements on performative artistic gestures in Armenia at the time. But Grigoryan’s testimony is more than symptomatic. Indeed, it not only reveals the discontent that he and his peers experienced with nonofficial artists of the 1970s generation, it also places them antagonistically in relation to the “officially oppositional” Museum of Modern Art and its founding director.⁷The museum was the first of its kind in the USSR. It presented works by the 1960–70s generation of artists who entered the scene because of the Thaw, Nikita Khrushchev’s liberalization of culture. In their work, they reflected on national and ethnic themes with modernist form and positioned themselves as oppositional to orthodox Soviet culture, although the very foundation of the Museum was licensed by the Soviet state. Given this anti-institutional ethos, one would expect the Museum to be a natural ally of the younger generation of rebellious artists. However, acting from a position of defense of high modernism and its national spirit, the Museum responded negatively. The anti-institutional ethos—even when enacted from within an institution, as was already the case with the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan—was to characterize the first large artistic/cultural movement of nonofficial artists in Armenia: the 3rd Floor. The assumption that truly free art has the power to break away from institutional boundaries and conventions was to become formative for contemporary art in Armenia and serve as a key signifier of the resistance and subversion attached to performative practices. These practices were often seen as a means of revealing the truth that the deceptive facade of official narratives and institutions concealed. As the figure of truth, the performative gesture occupies a structurally marginal and, at times, subterranean position vis-à-vis the official institutions.

In 1987 young art critic Nazareth Karoyan—as if echoing Grigoryan’s retrospectively expressed discontent with the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan—first discovered and then meticulously categorized the garbage accumulated on the roof of the Museum. The pile of trash was documented in an inventory that Karoyan presented the same year at the Union of Artists’ official meeting, to the distress of many of those present. It is interesting that garbage, as a signifier of contradictions hidden behind the beautiful facade of official cultural politics, was not merely revealed but also categorized and itemized. This conceptual gesture was among the triggers for the 3rd Floor’s first exhibition, held that same year, and marked the movement’s mission, which was to reform cultural institutions from within and resist official culture from its very margins.

In the same year as Karoyan’s “garbage action,” a group of artists embarked upon the reformation of the Union of Artists of Armenia. This first event was more of a festival than a coherent exhibition, and it took place in the conference hall located on the third floor of the Union, a space not designated for exhibitions. It was the location of the organization’s first convention that gave the movement its name: “the 3rd Floor.” The 3rd Floor came into being in 1987 when several young artists were invited to be part of the youth division of the Union.

Ideologically, the movement presented a mixture of romantic liberalism, nationalism, and libertarianism, with anarchist dreams of omnipotence and contradicting ideologies that often went hand in hand. Its members romanticized symbols of Western consumerism and subcultures to the degree that they had come to denote ideals of individual freedom and autonomy. The critique of Soviet culture through its opposite other—signs of capitalist consumer culture as inherently democratic—situates the 3rd Floor within the intellectual climate of the late-Soviet and socialist intelligentsia’s romantic alliance with liberal democracy. In the practices of those involved in the 3rd Floor, these ideals were understood from an artistic perspective: the citizen’s freedom was equal to that of the artist’s “absolute and universal right to mix different artistic styles and images on the surface of the canvas.”⁸The Union’s seminal 1988 performance Hail to the Union of Artists from the Netherworld: The Official Art Has Died reenacted the opposition to the Soviet and its cultural policy on metaphorical terms.

On December 12 several artists in the movement dressed as the resurrected dead and, like their heavy-metal heroes, strode into one of the Union of Artists’ conventional exhibitions and declared the death of official art. In this Happening, recorded under two different titles—The Official Art Has Died and Hail to the Union of Artists from the Netherworld—they made their way silently through the exhibition hall, viewed traditional paintings hung on the walls of an art institution defending Soviet official orthodoxy, and recognizing the symptomatic significance of their action, took photographs of themselves in various groupings and positions before walking out. (fig. 3) This event crystalized the 3rd Floor’s belief in the incommensurability of art as a space for free creation and the institution ruled by the tyranny of banality: if art is the collectively constructed dream of underground heroes, the institution is the counterimage of the conventional domain of a properly dead and officially sanctioned reality.⁹

Within the framework of perestroika’s belief in change from within, the 3rd Floor oscillated on a thin and delicate line between official recognition and rejection, occupying both the cultural mainstream and its vanguard margins. The official discourse of the pre-perestroika period of stagnation, identified with the Soviet experience as such, returned in the practices of the 3rd Floor’s members as a trauma never able to be articulated but rather transformed through the recurring return of various invented and real personages. These personages were born from the anti-Soviet realm. Sometimes they occupied the margins of official discourses, styles, forms, and techniques; at other times, they hid underground from the watchful eyes of the Soviet collective consciousness. The “Soviet” recurred in the haunted figures of ghosts and “authoritarian personages,” such as a character found in the works of Grigor Mikaelyan (known as Kiki), who was, at that time, part of the 3rd Floor. Kiki constructed and consistently pursued the “revelation” of Bobo, a disembodied fictional character with no particular shape or form, whose name is commonly invoked to scare children. In Kiki’s series of abstract paintings, which materialize through performative gestures, Bobo is the secret service agent, the KGB officer, the immaterial eye that controls: he is the scarecrow for the dissident intelligentsia. The figure of Bobo had to be constantly reconstituted, constantly in process, never fully materialized. (The first Bobos appeared in the mid-1980s, and they continue to appear today.) This figure would be indexed through a performative action enacted on a canvas spread out on the floor around which the artist circled in mad movements as they threw paint in scribbly brushstrokes (or rather “broomstrokes,” as Kiki would always use a broom). The canvas itself became a site of exorcism of the official and ideological. This character’s formal features include two circles created through the expressive gestural application of paint and sometimes enclosed in a triangle, while its repetitive reconstitution reveals the compulsively repetitive structure of trauma—a repetition that paradoxically recurs as a unique event each time it is reproduced. The canvas appears as a space of psychic discharge upon which the repressed returns.¹⁰

In the framework of the 3rd Floor’s exhibitions, artist Ashot Ashot executed several performances that made metaphysical claims of transcendence through the overcoming of “facts.” For this, Ashot Ashot adopted a self-designated strategy called afaktum, which comprised deliberate and methodic reduction of matter and speech to their basic elements, pointing toward “permanent art.” A photograph of his performance A Structure of Communication for the 1989 exhibition 666 shows a woman standing in the middle of the action with threads diagonally stretched from her head to the ground and forming a web around her. (fig. 5) Here, communication is revealed as a cultural imperative of a supposedly closed world opening to the outside, but as soon as it is revealed, it is demolished: the threads are subsequently unthreaded and destroyed.

Another underground hero of the netherworld Sev (Herik Khachatryan) used performative actions to produce objects from scrap metal. His adopted persona was itself performative, involving his signature black clothing, a color reaffirmed in his artistic name (sev in Armenian means “black”).¹¹As early as 1985 (since his first encounter with Kiki), Sev had been visiting junkyards, collecting scrap metal, and welding it in front of audiences as objets, a practice that is ongoing. A photograph from 1987 records one such expedition to the Yerevan Thermal Power Plant with photographer Aram Udinyan. (fig. 6) In this image, both protagonists are squatting next to materials they have gathered. One can only imagine Sev’s “sinister” visage, dressed all in black, marching with a fire torch and manipulating metal in front of bewildered audiences in the late-Soviet years. Sev’s work was directly inspired by postwar Neo-Dada and Nouveau Realism, which he encountered for the first time through catalogues and slides introduced by art critic Nazareth Karoyan.¹²In a 1989 action, the artist paid homage to his idol of Nouveau Realism César (César Baldaccini; French, 1921–1998) during the 3rd Floor’s visit to Paris for the opening of their exhibition. The artist executed a reverse summersault in front of one César’s assemblages. (fig. 7) For Sev, artists of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, such as Kazimir Malevich (Russian, born Ukraine, 1878–1935), César, and Alberto Burri (Italian, 1915–1995) were his guides and inspiration toward a countercultural understanding of art as a sphere of freedom.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s the imperative formulated by the late-Soviet anti-Soviet artistic avant-garde in Armenia was the revelation of the authentic yet subterranean layers of reality as truth that had been distorted and falsified behind the ideological facade of official lies. The allegorical personifications of this subterranean truth were various netherworld dwellers, as in the case of the 3rd Floor’s 1988 Happening, or antiheroes whose painterly materialization invoked deep-seated scopophobia (Bobo’s main feature are the two empty circles that gaze back from their void without forming an eye—a “location” of the scopic drive that circles around the organ but never dwells within it, as per Lacan’s formulation of the gaze)¹³ and the surpassing of the empirical and factual in search of a quasi-mystical pure reality (as in the work of Ashot Ashot). But paradoxically, these anxieties of visibility were not revealed through disappearance and immaterialization but instead through loud gestures and actions of excess and plentitude that were positioned as constituting a counter-sphere to the official and the ideological. Ultimately, the 3rd Floor was striving for cultural and social visibility.

Aesthetically, the artists associated with the movement engaged with painting in an “expanded field” in order to exceed it from within, through the body and temporality: artists of the Happening walked through an exhibition of paintings with their faces painted, Bobo was invoked in paintings, and Ashot-Ashot “overcame” paint by spilling it over the model’s body. Painting here was both affirmed and surpassed through its multimedia expansion, and this dynamic of affirming a traditional medium while exceeding its specificity and, at times, negating it altogether rhymes with the structural positioning of these gestures from within the official discourse and in resistance to it. In other words, these performative gestures were articulated from within the margins of the officially sanctioned glasnost policy as its avant-garde. Retrospectively, however, the 3rd Floor artists often situated their exhibitions as a resistant and anti-institutional subcultural response to what they perceived as the violence of the official culture that hindered freedom and creativity. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Armenia’s independence, this understanding of avant-garde art as a mode of subcultural resistance to the dominant culture entered a certain crisis. As the Soviet world was disappearing through fast-paced privatization, financial collapse, de-modernization of urban spaces, and socially induced historical amnesia of the recent past, to the late-Soviet avant-gardists, the 1990s promised a reconciliation between art (imagined as a realm of free creation) and dominant culture (understood as a regressive and repressive mechanism of conformity).

Editors’ note: Read Part II of this series here, and Part III here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)

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