Vahram Aghasyan / THE RUINS OF OUR TIMES

12 October 2010 > 22 October 2010 The opening of the exhibition will take place on Tuesday 12th of October at 8 pm in the Alkatraz gallery

The interest for ruins has accompanied the western contemporaity in waves already since the 18th century on as part of a broader discourse on memories, trauma, forgetfulness and imagining of other futures. There is nostalgia linked with ruins, as they seem to contain the promises that have vanished from the present. There seem to be no space for deserted buildings in the new capitalist consumer oriented time. Commodities do not gain value with age, they become outdated, get recycled or dumped, the buildings are pulled down and then built anew. The chance for a thing to age and become a ruin has been decreasing in the age of turbo capitalism. The unprocessed remains are pushed to the edge. The old has to be destroyed and replaced by new, and the new is nowadays made in the way to look old, and this phenomenon is more common than the refurbishing of the old. These lonely, deserted buildings preach of the society we live in, carrying with them all sorts of stories and memories seemingly absent when we look at them.

Vahram Aghasyan has conceived his project on the research of deserted areas. The exhibition is the result of a research of the marginalized, deserted empty spaces in Armenia. The project is strongly marked with specificality of the space, culture, and the history of Armenia that he keeps comparing, looking for parallels with the history of some other cultural regions. The photographs and videos that the author assemblies into the installation construct a new story, sourcing its content in the acquired information and stories connected with a particular deserted building that are, however, regarded as inauthentic. Into his works he - for this reason - incorporates written comments complementing the visual part of the story and are important for the understanding when reading the works. The author claims that it is not possible to find historical references concerning these areas in the existing sources, often even any information at all, but the information - when found - speak loudly about the society we live in.

Vahram Aghasyan, born in 1974, lives and works in Yerevan, Armenia. Internationally, he has exhibited at the international biennial in Istambul, in the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, the First Contemporary Art Biennial of Thessaloniki. His works have been shown at the exhibition Contemporary video art from Armenia in the museum of contemporary art in Lyon (Musee d’art Contemporain). He also participated in the group exhibition entitled Resistance through art in the Armenian pavilion at the 51^st Venice Biennial in 2005. His last solo exhibition in Armenia, Ghost City, was hosted by ACCEA - Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art. He has recently ended his art residence in the Kunstlerstatte Schloss Bleckede in German. Aghasyan's works were also presented at the 28th Biennial of Graphic Arts at the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana (2009).

More about the artist on http://freenet.am/~dump/

Photos from the opening:  Sunčan P. Stone