YEREVAN-THE HAGUE, the Netherlands — Andrius Arutiunian (born 1991, Vilnius, Lithuania), a multifaceted conceptual artist and composer of Armenian and Lithuanian heritage, works with hybrid forms of listening, vernacular knowledge, and contemporary cosmologies. From 2010 to 2016, he studied music composition at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. His selected exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), M HKA (Antwerp), Stroom (The Hague), Sapieha Palace (Vilnius), Survival Kit 13 (Riga), FACT (Liverpool), Rewire (The Hague), CTM Festival (Berlin), and the Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius), as well as biennials in Venice, Shanghai, Gwangju, Lyon, and the 15th Baltic Triennial. In 2023, he was a DAAD Artist-in-Residence Fellow. Since 2016, he has been a sound researcher at the Sedje Hémon Foundation in The Hague. From 2016 to 2021, he served as a guest tutor at the Master Artistic Research department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. In 2024, Arutiunian was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize.
Dear Andrius, in 2022, you represented Armenia at the 59th Venice Art Biennale with your solo show entitled Gharīb. Since then, I have been following your activities online, and last year I attended your performance in Yerevan. Your musical language is tightly connected to modern technologies, yet would it be accurate to say that it seems rooted in ancient sonorities from various cultures?
My musical language roams; in other words, it seeks spaces where the distortion of time, hypnotic structures, and cosmological thinking converge. It is not tied to a singular model of sound-making, even if it is often rooted in what might be called the pan-Caucasian world of sonic traditions. Instead, it is concerned with our ways of knowledge exchange, violent logics of old empires, and those yet to come. So, this musical language migrates, as many do, with the technologies of different decades shaping its manifestation anew, each bringing their own limitations and sonic discoveries.
The first association I have with the word Gharīb is the famous Oriental tale about the wandering ashugh, Ashik Kerib. The atmosphere in your installation on the Venice Pavilion felt distinctly Oriental—quite intriguing and even unusual, if not surreal: a golden, tongue-shaped installation, sounds and music, Armenian carpets, a vinyl player, and, most unexpectedly, a special fruit vodka called Gharīb Oghi. Although there was a booklet with explanatory text, is it meaningful to seek connections between these objects?
Gharīb Pavilion was ethereal, its existence in people’s imaginaries as significant as its brief physical manifestation. Purposefully eluding definition and a defining purpose, the Pavilion sought to exist as a good dream—of an alternate polit-historical composition, where the future simultaneously sends its best wishes to the past, and ancestral knowledge is passed through the deliriums of modernity into the equally contradictory present. This is a decidedly anti-Orientalist approach—it demands a view of the Caucasus and Middle Eastern cosmologies as vibrant, rich, distinct, in their own right.
Together with Gharīb Pavilion’s curator, Anne Davidian, we often reflected on the idea of the vernacular, of the disappeared, of voices that have been silenced yet remained resilient. Gharīb was bound by this shared desire to unearth worlds that never were—a reverse somnio-archeology of sorts, departing far but always returning to its home place.
