🗓️January 22 – February 5, 2015
LUDA GALLERY
📍42 Mokhovaya St, St. Petersburg 191028 Russia
◆St. Petersburg Arts Project presents “Overcoming the Everydayness. Contemporary Art From Armenia”◆
This project is about the city—about those places where critique and resistance to the universal routine become possible. It is about the awareness of “moments” which, according to Henri Lefebvre, “raise questions about the relationship between social life and nature, blur the conventional boundary between nature on one side and society and culture on the other, and show that the individual cannot be separated from society.”
How do these “social relations and forms of individualized consciousness” disrupt accepted everyday life? How do “moments” contribute to the formation of that other, invisible city as described by the artists? How tangible and real is it? Or are the artists themselves the creators of this marginal space, which they have appropriated and now possess?
Mger Azatyan, who works with narrative material, presents objects, places, moods, and situations that—alongside a documentary approach—are deeply poetic and always contain a certain narrative. These complex image-stories appear as undeniable truths voiced by the artist. They serve as witnesses to the unnoticed or simply as remnants, traces of the past.
In creating these images, Mger often combines photography and text, but in this project he presents one of his rare video works (from 2007). It tells the story of the artist’s favorite place—a site he has returned to often in his work: a park space in Yerevan that has housed the “Vernissage” flea market since the early 1990s. On weekends and in good weather, this is one of the most crowded places in Yerevan. Yet in Mger’s video, the market is shown in an entirely different light. The empty, snow-covered Vernissage stuns with its stillness and calm. The artist reveals another side of this place, admiring the emptiness, the absence of bustle, the halted time, as if foreshadowing its current fate.
In 2014, part of this neglected park with its non-functioning fountains was reconstructed and completely transformed. The image created by the artist has now become part of history—joining the archive of a disappearing city.