Post-Revolution Art: Dialogues about Revolution and Power

These four video statements are also integral parts of the Armenian pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, and can be seen at the Garden of Palazzo Zenobio of the Collegio Armeno Moorat Raphael until November 24.

Another work, which is also part of Armenia’s presentation at the Biennale, was the action by Narine Arakelyan (see ADK 183, “Revolution auf Sparflamme”), in which about 50 volunteers in Venice reenacted the periodic “iron pots and pans” action. During the revolution, women in Yerevan and other Armenian cities would open their windows and bang on pots and pans. In Berlin, a special video documentation of the action in Venice was produced for the Wolf&Galentz exhibition. Since one could listen to all the other videos at the Berlin show with ear phones, the noise of soup spoons banging pots and pans created background noise and brought the message home to the visitors.

The last video work, which could be viewed on a separate monitor, was linked aesthetically to the four videos in the entrance area. Tamar Shirinian, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology in Jackson, Mississippi, tells the story of the women’s movement in the early years of socialism and the Stalin era in Armenia and the Soviet Union overall. Shirinian accuses the Bolsheviks of having exploited the “women’s issue” to rule in the outlying regions.

Gyulamiryan included this video in the exhibition as a deliberately provocative statement. Shirinian places in question something that has long since become a commonplace, namely, that in the Soviet Union — to which Armenia belonged — equality between the sexes was more advanced (in the sense that it guaranteed more rights for women) than in the West. She makes clear that the relations between the sexes must be considered in a more differentiated form, and that more or less hidden disadvantages for women in the Soviet Union must be made visible; also, that the motives for the actual improvement in living standards for women must be examined critically.

Two further exhibits complete the show. First, the three posters by Lusine Talayan. One of her works is a photo with graffiti, a play on words in Armenian, that might be freely translated, “A woman is without man.”/”A woman has no lord.” (see Armenian) As the curator writes in her text for the exhibition, this sentence, together with another work, discusses the theme of a “Reflection about complex questions regarding the visibility or invisibility of women, their relations to one another, and their desire for appropriate recognition of their importance in the social realm; the possibility of remembrance and the politics of commemoration.”

The third poster presents in simple graphic form the well-known statue of Mother Armenia, without her sword. The artist adds an obscene phrase borrowed from “male language,” except in the female form. This short saying functions as an eye-catcher for Armenian speakers; but, more important in my view, is the rejection formulated in the text, of any formal portrayal of Mother Armenia as a “patriarchal” representation of power.