From the 11th – the 14th of May 2018 Armenia’s very first Art Fair, was held in Yerevan Expo. Playing host to curators, galleries, exhibitions and a number of talks and performances, Armenia Art Fair welcomed artworld professionals, buyers and the general public to come together to discover art from the Black Sea region, the Caucasus, the Middle East, UK and beyond.
Located at the crossroads of east and west, Armenia Art Fair succeeded in attracting galleries from a diverse array of cultures.
Amongst the Armenian-based galleries, standouts included Albert & Tove Boyajian’s exhibition of Saro Galentz’s (1946-2017) work, whose still life compositions are comparable to European surrealist paintings.
This ‘surreal’ component carried through to Karoyan Gallery’s display. Part of the Institute for Contemporary Art in Yerevan, the gallery’s overall focus is in working with artists who produce post-media conceptually-driven works. This was most visible in the unmissable Instinct & Intelligence by Vahram Galstyan.
The work consisted of a long table covered in plaster, with a seat at either end. In front of the chairs and on top of the table were two white bowls filled with several white heads floating in a mysterious blue liquid. The resulting work looked like it fell straight onto earth from out of a science fiction movie and certainly entertained and perplexed the majority of the art fair’s visitors.
Among the top booths in its inaugural year was the presence of Art Residence Aley from Lebanon and Syrian London-based gallery Litehouse. Situated in Aley, which is on the Lebanese freeway to Damascus, Art Residence Aley is a residency programme that provides Syrian refugee artists with the opportunity to make art in Lebanon. In Yerevan, Art Residence Aley exhibited the work of Farah Azrak, Adel Dauood and Hasko Hasko in a vibrant display of collages and large-scale paintings of oil and canvas, and also invited the artists to Armenia to engage with the art fair’s audience. In an extension of the project in Aley, Litehouse Gallery in London also displayed a moving array of contemporary Syrian works with paintings by Heba Al Akkad and Shadi Abou Saada being particularly memorable.
Also of note were a number of curated booths that included the participation of Belarusian Nata Sokolowska and an exhibition entitled The Figure: Presence and Absence by Dr Randall Rhodes. Sokolowska’s display of Oleg Kostyuchenko’s work were especially striking, with deep red paintings of women floating on tire swings in front of large carcasses of raw meat (Flashback, oil on canvas, 2016) and a self-portrait in which the artist represents pushing himself out of his comfort zone (Approaching zero – 3, oil on canvas, 2017).
The participation of young Armenian artists were emphasised through the presence of the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia. There were also a number of projects working to promote Armenian art beyond its borders including KulturDialog Armenian and Progressive Art Agency, an international artistic collective which works to produce art that crosses boundaries and disciplines, with a highlight being Vahag Hamalbashyan’s Submarine, acrylic on canvas, 2016, in which a number of disconnected figures come together to eat ice cream on a beach.
In addition to the nineteen booths, an ‘Open Space’ exhibited the work of young contemporary Armenian artists through five exhibitions. Curated by Eva Khachatrian, this section of the art fair shone a light on young emerging Armenian artists and cemented practitioners from Armenia as innovative, dynamic and daring. Particularly noteworthy amongst this cluster of exhibitions was the projection of a series of films by Hamlet Hovsepian and Tigran Khachatryan, in which the audience was able to witness rarely screened films of the Armenian avant-garde, as well as Grigor Khachatryan’s ticking work Those Who Love Me Have Power Over Me, Greater Power Have Those Whom I Love.
Another young artist was showcased during Armenia Art Fair in Hayp Pop Up Gallery’s The Leather Show, which took place in conjunction with the fair. The exhibition at the Mergerlian Institute presented the work of Narek Barseghyan through several large paintings inspired by 90s pop culture. The works incorporate Armenian, Russian and English text scrawled over images of bright blue and pink figures wearing white t-shirts and jackets. During the opening a fashion-performance took place where a number of designers who collaborated with the artist paraded their designs in an electrifying art-meets-fashion runway experience.
This was not the first performance during the fair, which also hosted a Transliterative Tease by Polish-Iranian duo Slavs and Tartars. An additional and unexpected performative piece took place during the art fair’s opening when a group of artists carrying masks of political Armenian figures – including the recently rejected Serzh Sargysyan and the newly elected Nikol Pashinyan – mingled with guests carrying a red suitcase with the word government printed on the front in Armenian. In an act that could have proved delicate, the artists invited the audience to interact with them and take selfies with their masks, adding an element of humour to recent political events in Armenia.
Adding to the predominantly visual art fair was a round table discussion and open Q & A between art world professionals and the art fair audience. Shifting Perspectives on Art from Local to Global was a night owl dialog moderated by Dr Randall Rhodes, provost at the American University of Armenia between Susanna Gyulamirayn (director of the Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory), writer and curator Georg Schoellhammer and critic, curator and director of the Institute for Contemporary Art Nazareth Karoyan. The evening event allowed for a moment of reflection on the current global trends in an ever-diversifying art market.
All in all, the debut Armenia Art Fair succeeded in not only highlighting the talents of artists, curators and galleries inside Armenia, but also in attracting practitioners from outside the region, creating a diverse foundation upon which to build for the second edition of the fair in 2019.
