University of Lisbon | November 28–30, 2024

This international conference brought together academics, curators, and art critics to explore the legacy of the Soviet period and its continuing impact on art and culture in Armenia and the wider Caucasus region.

Through a rich day of talks and discussion, participants examined key artistic figures such as Yervand Kochar and Arshile Gorky, reflected on the role of institutions like the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and explored questions of artistic freedom, post-socialist economies, and the emergence of art markets after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Notable speakers included Angela Harutyunyan (Berlin University of the Arts), Pedro Lapa (University of Lisbon), Nazareth Karoyan and Ruben Arevshatyan (ICA Yerevan), and Iain Robertson (Hongik University, Seoul).

The event concluded with a forward-looking session on the promotion of Armenian modern and contemporary art as a research and institutional project presented by Zara Ouzounian-Halpin and Stephen McCoubrey.

Institutional Partners:

• ARTIS – Art History Institute, University of Lisbon
• Erasmus Mundus Joint Master “Managing Art and Cultural Heritage in Global Markets”
• Institute for Contemporary Art, Yerevan
• Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
• Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia

This event is part of AMCA’s broader initiative aimed at promoting and reintegrating Armenian modern and contemporary art into the global art dialogue.

Once on the periphery of global art conversations, Armenia is now asserting itself as a dynamic cultural force in the Caucasus. Its capital, Yerevan, has become home to a growing number of contemporary artists, independent initiatives, and international partnerships, creating new momentum for the country’s visual arts scene.

As the Asia Times article “Armenia: The New Modern Art Hub of the Caucasus” highlights, this shift has been powered by a mix of grassroots energy and strategic programming. Institutions like the Cafesjian Center for the Arts and new platforms like the Armenia Art Fair are drawing global attention, while local artists are increasingly engaging with regional and international dialogues. The fusion of Soviet-era legacies with bold contemporary voices is shaping a distinctly Armenian modern art narrative.

This growing visibility is not only cultural—it’s strategic. Armenia’s art scene is now part of a broader conversation about identity, diplomacy, and regional positioning. Read the full article to learn more about how Armenia is carving out its space on the modern art map:

Armenia: The New Modern Art Hub of the Caucasus – Asia Times

Earlier this year, his much-anticipated monograph Paul Guiragossian: Displaced Modernity – edited by the curatorial duo Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, together with Paul Guiragossian’s daughter and president of the Paul Guiragossian Foundation, Manuella Guiragossian – was launched at Art Dubai. The book was recently transformed into an exhibition at Beirut Art Fair called Lebanon Modern! A Tribute to Paul Guiragossian, which consisted of a chronological display of the artist’s work that not only included paintings and drawings, but also family photographs, film clips and quotes. Armenia Art Fair spoke with Manuella Guiragossian about her father’s artwork and the exhibition in Beirut.

Armenia Art Fair: How did the exhibition at Beirut Art Fair come about?

Manuella Guiragossian: This year, and more specifically November 20, 1993, marks the 25^th anniversary of Paul Guiragossian’s passing so over a year ago the Paul Guiragossian Foundation planned for a few commemorative events surrounding this anniversary as well as the release of the much anticipated monograph, Paul Guiragossian: Displacing Modernity published by Silvana Editoriale and edited by Sam Bardaouil, Till Fellrath and myself.

The book was launched at Art Dubai in March 2018 in parallel with an exhibition at the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah with works coming from collections only in the UAE.

The Tribute exhibition at the Beirut Art Fair took place in September as the monograph was also released worldwide and was set to take the audience on a little walk through the 5 decades of Guiragossian’s career.

AAF: What was the reception like to the exhibition?

MA: Anything we do around Paul Guiragossian always gets great reception and fascination by all generations. We usually get major attendance and very often re-attendance by people who want to learn more and can’t get enough. I feel that people have a thirst to learn more about Guiragossian and working on this book for over 5 years gives me great satisfaction in sharing a lot about the artist’s life and work with the public.

We get art collectors, art enthusiasts, students and press as well as people who are newly discovering the artist. Audiences are always thankful and appreciative of the efforts we make as a foundation and that gives us the drive to continue.

AAF: How did you go about curating the exhibition, why did you select the images that you did, the film clips, the photographs?

MA: As I had worked on the archives for more than 10 years, I have a very particular understanding of my father’s path and artistic evolution, so I wanted to present that (as we did in the monograph) through the archival material as well as the original works. I wanted to create that path through the decades of his life and have the audience walk through the book and discover the different stages of Paul’s life.

AAF: What is your favourite work in the exhibition?  

MA: It’s very difficult to pick one work as my favourite because I have many. Every decade has masterpieces that are stunning and have such depth, especially since I know the stories behind them, it makes it hard to choose. Having said that, I have a special place in my heart for “Composition” (also titled “La Grande Charge”, 1990-91. Oil on canvas. 130 x 200 cm.) which is magnificent in my opinion because it encapsulates my father’s entire career. To reach that kind of virtuosity after about 50 years is just amazing. It’s also why I used a detail from it on the cover of the monograph.

AAF: The book that the Beirut Art Fair exhibition was based on (Paul Guiragossian: Displacing Modernity) launched at Art Dubai in March of this year, what did it mean to have this exhibition in Beirut?

MA: Beirut is the city that embraced my father, gave him a permanent home, a family and success. The Lebanese people adore Paul Guiragossian and are always very excited and proud to see his work, that’s why it’s very important for us to release this book in Beirut and to do exhibitions around Guiragossian as often as possible.

AAF: With the inclusion of quotes and film clips, it seemed like you tried to let people know about Paul Guiragossian’s personality, adding layers to Paul Guiragossian the painter, with the father, husband, teacher. What is it most important to you for people to know about him? 

MA: I think people need to know the combination of things Paul was in order to have a better understanding of his work and his philosophy. It’s through monographs such as the one just published with 400 pages, 600 artworks and archival documents and comprehensive anthology of primary documents that we can tap into the world of Guiragossian a little bit. People are usually familiar with one aspect of his work while there is a fascinating amount of ideas, history, conferences and a very unique look at life that they need to know as well. Only then will people be able to have a clear idea of who Paul was and then the artwork will mean so much more.

AAF: Will the exhibition tour? What do you hope people will take away from the exhibition?

MA: Paul Guiragossian represents multiple people not just Armenians, Palestinians, Lebanese but a vast region, which is mostly misunderstood, misrepresented or marginalized. A touring exhibition sheds light on all these things to a larger public and other cultures who never come to our region to be able to learn and experience our arts and artists. Our culture. A comprehensive monograph about Paul Guiragossian that is distributed worldwide for the first time, is a good start and we hope these exhibitions will get a chance to reach more countries and museums for us to be able to share all this with.

Berlin. The following research reveals basic art market data for the South Caucasus region. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia are each represented by the career developments of three selected top artists. The analysis describes the dynamics of the artists’ ranking over the years. The ranking is calculated according to the number and quality of shows in relation to all other artists listed on Artfacts.Net. The highest-ranking position is one, and the lowest is 206256.

In the article Armenia! The New Modern Art Hub of the Caucasus?, published in Asia Times on February 3rd, 2019, the author Vigen Galstyan classifies Armenian post-Soviet artists such as: Karen Ohanyan, Grigor Khachatryan, and David Kochunts as ‘treasure troves for adventurous collectors’. None of those artists has a strong profile within the Artfacts.Net platform.

‘ There is a certain tension between public critics’ reviews on contemporary Caucasian art and facts as presented by quotas within the exhibitions’ history at Artfacts.Net. The conclusion drawn from these examples is that émigré Caucasian artists, whose work was displayed in Western institutions, managed to build more international profiles than those who remained at home. ‘

Results

Armenia

The first top Armenian artist, Armen Eloyan (b.1966, Yerevan), is placed at number 6260 in the global ranking. He works in the medium of painting. He is known for his large-scale, irreverent paintings of anthropomorphic animals and figures, in which the artist depicts absurd narratives in his darkly existential manner. He participated in 69 exhibitions, of which 18 were solo shows. He was mostly exhibited in Switzerland, Belgium, and Germany. Eloyan is represented by Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (no. 12 in the United Kingdom), Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam (no. 9 in the Netherlands) and Tim van Laere Gallery, Antwerp (no.16 in Belgium). Exhibition history indicates that Armen Eloyan’s career is almost entirely based in Western Europe, with the exception of a few shows in the United States.

The second top Armenian-Canadian artist Yousuf Karsh (b.1908, Mardin, Ottoman Empire -modern-day Turkey – d. 2002 in Boston) is placed at number 9073 in the global ranking. Karsh worked in photography, representing portraits of famous individuals. He was exhibited 102 times, almost half of them (48) in solo shows. He was mostly active in the United States and Canada but has also exhibited around the world: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan. His works are included in notable museum collections, such as those of Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Canada, Toronto.

The third top place is represented by Vahram Aghasyan (b.1974, Yerevan) at no 10572 in the global ranking. In contrast to the previous two, Aghasyan lives and works in his native Yerevan and has much stronger ties to the local art scene in Armenia. He works with photography, time-based media, and installation (Museum of Revolution, Installation, 2014, fig.1). His work was presented at 52 exhibitions, of which four are solo shows and five are biennials. Aghasyan belongs to a younger generation of artists and has had many fewer solo shows than either Karsh or Eloyan. He has a more diverse exhibition history, however, having had mostly group shows across Europe and in Armenia. He has been mostly exhibited in Italy and frequently in Poland and the Balkans. He participated in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005.

Fig 1

Azerbaijan

In addition to Azerbaijan’s established national art institutions (National Art Museum of Azerbaijan, Baku Museum of Modern Art, The Museum Center of the Ministry of Culture of the Azerbaijan Republic), investment in recent years in the capital city of Baku has led to a wave of gentrification, giving rise to a selection of dynamic contemporary art spaces that support the careers of many emergent Azeri practitioners.

ArtFacts’ top ranked Azeri artist is Babi Badalov (b.1959,Lerik) with a world artist ranking of 3,075. He currently lives and works in Paris. Working at the intersection of visual art and poetry, Badalov is known for creating installations rooted in the concept of assemblage that combine various objects and media and regularly incorporate text, employing a breadth of symbols and languages. Because their content is political and aimed at furthering international dialogues around identity and equality, the artist was forced to leave Azerbaijan, travelling first to Saint Petersburg before settling in Paris. On returning to mount an exhibition at YARAT (Baku’s #3 Art Institute according to Artfacts) in 2019 (fig.2), Badalov commented that ‘much of the work exhibited across Azerbaijan is conservative; there are no new topics, certainly no dialogue. My mission in this exhibition at YARAT is to bring exactly what I am doing in Paris to Baku. The painted fabrics suspended from the ceiling address topics of anti-capitalism, decolonization, language identity, spirituality, mysticism, Orientalism and poetics. There is also a mural on the back wall that I made for Azerbaijan that explores the country’s complex cultural identity.’ (Mousse 67 – moussemagazine.it/babi-badalov-alice-bucknell-2019/).

Badalov exhibits regularly at international museums and is represented by the Galérie Jérome Poggi, Paris, and The Gallery Apart, Rome.

Fig 2

Georgia

According to the Artfacts.Net database, Georgia has featured in 126 exhibitions, representing 146 artists, within 25 existing institutions, in five cities. A predecessor of the present-day museum, the National Art Gallery in Tbilisi, focusses on Georgian artists. It functions under joint administration with Tbilisi History Museum, forming the Museum of Georgia. The Museum of Modern Art Tbilisi (MOMA) constitutes the next relevant institution, followed by the Center of Contemporary Art Tbilisi (CCAT).

The top Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze (b.1971 in Tbilisi) is placed at no. 758 in the world artist ranking. Currently based in Berlin, Djordjadze is mainly known for creating sculptures and installation art (fig.4). She has taken part in 152 exhibitions, of which 29 were solo shows (the last one in 2019 in Tokyo) and, six were biennials (the most recent being the last one Biennale di Venezia – 56th International Art Exhibition). She has mostly exhibited in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. Djordjadze’s peak year, 2012, was the year in which she participated in the most public group exhibitions.

The second top ranked Georgian artist, Andro Wekua (b.1977, Sochumi), originally from Soviet Georgia, is placed no. 1059 in the global ranking. He lives in Zurich and Berlin, where he works with the media painting, drawing, film, sculpture, and installation (fig.5). His work is mostly displayed in Switzerland, the United States and Germany, featuring in a total of 145 exhibitions, of which 29 were solo shows (the most recent in 2019 at Gladstone Gallery in New York), eight biennials (the most recent in 2013 in Osaka at the Dojima River Biennale), and eight art fairs (last one in 2018 at TEFAF, Maastricht). His works can be found mainly in American museum collections, such as those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

The third Georgian artist, Vajiko Chachkhiani (b.1985), ranks no. 2198 on the global artist ranking list. He lives and works in Berlin. He is an installation artist (fig.6). He has taken part in significantly fewer exhibitions than the above mentioned artists; 33 altogether eight of which were solo shows (the most recent at Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn). He also participated in two biennials (the most recent being the 15th Istanbul Biennial in 2017) and five art fairs (the most recent being Art Basel 2019). Chachkhiani is mainly represented in Germany, Japan, and Switzerland, and his works can be found in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Siegen, Germany.

The analysis shows a pattern common to all three Georgian artists; they are based and are creatively active in Western Europe, where they are officially represented.

Fig 3

Fig 4

Fig 5

Martiros Saryan, Self-portrait 1909

Few painters have rewritten a country’s visual DNA as radically as Martiros Saryan (1880-1972). In the decade before World War I he abandoned Impressionist greys for blazing, near-flat fields of colour that looked more like illuminated manuscripts than plein-air studies. Those chromatic experiments—later codified on everything from Soviet postage stamps to twenty-first-century tourism billboards—proved that a palette can serve as a nation-building toolkit.

Born in Nakhichevan-on-Don and trained at the Moscow School of Painting, Saryan devoured Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin and the “Blue Rose” Symbolists, yet kept one eye on Armenian carpet dyes and medieval miniatures. By 1905 he had switched from oil to tempera, a medium that “electrified the colours in his palette,” preparing the ground for an indigenous Fauvism years before he encountered Matisse.

The breakthrough came with Pomegranate Tree (1907) and By the Sea – Sphinx (1908). In both, outlines are pared to essentials while reds, cobalt blues and yellows clash like enamel in a khachkar. Critics noted the absence of atmospheric depth, yet that very flatness—echoing carpet design—let Saryan treat landscape as a portable icon: a nation could be rolled up, shipped abroad, and unfurled on any salon wall.

Between 1910 and 1913 the artist roamed Turkey, Egypt and Iran, refining what he called his “oriental cycle.” Constantinople Dogs (1910) wilts beneath a lapis sky while Date Palm (1911) stages camel, earth and canopy in three stacked colour blocks. Space rises, miniature-style, “from the bottom to the top,” refusing European perspective and thus re-anchoring vision in the East.

Genocide and exile scattered compatriots in 1915, but Saryan decided to do the opposite: he repatriated. Settling permanently in Yerevan in 1921, he began cycling through motifs of Mount Aragats and Mount Ararat, sculpting form “by eliminating details in a search for a generalising concept.” Sunlit Landscape (1924) consolidates hill, sky and orchard into interlocking colour plates, a pictorial grammar flexible enough to absorb both trauma and hope.

The new Soviet republic embraced him as proof that “national in form, socialist in content” could be more than a slogan. Party cadres praised his portraits of workers and intellectuals, yet what truly served the ideological project was his chromatic shorthand for Armenianness: apricot orange + indigo shadow = homeland. Under the policy of korenizatsiia (nativisation) such stylistic codes became state assets.

From the 1940s until his death, Saryan refined the formula into monumental canvases like Armenia (1964), where Ararat floats above a patchwork plain in colours so intense they seem back-lit. Here the mountain is less geology than emblem; hue supersedes line, suggesting that identity resides in spectral vibration rather than cartographic borders.

That spectral logic outlived him. Minas Avetisyan in the 1960s–70s, and countless poster artists after independence, recycled “Saryan orange” to signal continuity while shifting subject matter. Even today, a quick scan of Yerevan murals reveals his chromatic DNA flickering beneath street-art aerosol.

For AMCA, Saryan offers a template for thinking about art as soft infrastructure. His landscapes were never mere scenery; they were blueprints for psychological reconstruction after genocide, tools for Soviet nation-craft, and now—paradoxically—icons of a post-Soviet brand. Mapping that continuum helps us ask how colour, memory and statehood continue to co-author each other in contemporary Armenian practice.

We invite readers to explore our upcoming digital sliders that compare Saryan’s tempera studies with later oil panoramas, and to contribute family photographs or posters that show where his palette has migrated next. The chromatic nation he envisioned is still unfurling—stroke by stroke—in living rooms, studios and city streets worldwide. Join the conversation and add your own colours to the map.

In the spring of 1987, a rickety lift in the Artists’ Union of Armenia rattled up to the actual third floor, depositing a handful of twenty-somethings who would turn the building’s attic into a feverish laboratory of late-Soviet dissent. Within months the space—swiftly nicknamed “Yerort Hartak” (3rd Floor)—was staging ad-hoc performances lit by slide projectors and fuelled by Coca-Cola iconography smuggled from Moscow kiosks. What looked like a student prank soon became Armenia’s answer to perestroika: not a policy but a happening.

To grasp the shock such antics produced, recall the cultural climate of 1985-88. While Gorbachev loosened the screws in Moscow, Yerevan’s official art still revolved around Socialist Realism, and curators clung to a “national-in-form, socialist-in-content” dogma first enforced in the 1930s. Armenian modernists of the 1960s had opened fissures, but it took the glasnost moment to widen them into exits. 3rd Floor’s founders—Arman Grigoryan, Sev (Hendrik Khachatryan), Karen Andreasian and others—declared that modernity meant “autonomous, future-oriented, liberating practice,” a stance closer to Dada than to the neo-avant-gardes of Eastern Europe.

Their manifesto was simple: art must escape both artisan craft and state hierarchy. Borrowing the term Hamasteghtsakan—“crossover” or “collectively created art”—they abolished genre boundaries, invited non-artists to co-author works, and rebranded the gallery itself as a three-dimensional canvas. Like China’s Political Pop painters, they mixed Soviet symbols with Western consumer logos; but the effect in Yerevan was even more jarring because such imagery was still scarce on the street.

Critic Nazareth Karoyan traced the group’s lineage back to medieval manuscripts and forward to Italian Transavanguardia: hybrid, ornamental, defiantly provincial-and-cosmopolitan at once. Angela Harutyunyan added that 3rd Floor “mirrored the changing world of perestroika”—utopian, iconoclastic, yet oddly rooted in tradition. That paradox helps explain why Sev’s Object (1987)—a bare wooden frame draped with plastic sheeting—could scandalise a generation trained to equate mastery with brushwork.

Sev’s gesture was only the prelude. The legendary “3rd Floor ±” exhibition of 1990 turned the loft into a fun-house of painted mannequins, Xerox collages and on-the-spot graffiti, welcoming anyone who felt like adding a mark. Photographs from the show (figs. 72-74) reveal a riot of colour that anticipated the selfie museums of today, yet its politics were deadly serious: by refusing to rank high and low culture, the collective implicitly refused the Soviet ranking of citizens.

By 1994, however, the utopian mood curdled. Independence had arrived, but so had hyper-inflation and rolling blackouts. A new formation—ACT—stepped into the vacuum, swapping 3rd Floor’s romanticism for hard-edged institutional critique. If 3rd Floor protested from the outside, ACT protested from within the artwork: Davit Kareyan’s Art Referendum (1995) replaced the ballot box of fledgling democracy with an art object, exposing participation itself as theatrical.

ACT’s marches down Mashtots Avenue or interventions in the half-finished Mars robotics factory dissected the gap between neoliberal dreams and post-Soviet realities. Their materials dematerialised: split fire extinguishers, sliced coffee tins, piles of bureaucratic forms. The divorce of idea from object echoed an Armenian economy that suddenly traded goods for IOUs.

The 1990s also spawned Armenia’s contemporary-art infrastructure. NPAK (later HayArt) occupied the Modern Art Museum’s “Barrels” annex, while curators such as Sonia Balassanian forged Armenia’s first Venice-Biennale pavilion. Yet the scene fractured into two camps: “institutional art,” exemplified by Arman Grigoryan and Kareyan, and “institutional critique,” waged by Andreasian, Samvel Baghdassaryan and the ferociously nomadic Geo-Cunst-Expedition.

By decade’s end a strange reversal occurred: the conceptualists picked up brushes again, spiked with Pop sarcasm. Grigoryan’s Armenican Dream (1999) splashed Coca-Cola reds across a folk motif, while his canvas Civic Values advertised itself “For Sale: $50,” mocking the absent art market. “Form is contemporary,” argued Kareyan, “content is the past”—a new twist on the Soviet slogan he grew up with.

Fast-forward to the 2000s and you can still spot 3rd Floor DNA on Yerevan’s walls: Saga Saghatelian’s neon-bright mural Love is Electric (2016) or the stencil slogans that bloom around Kond. These pieces practice what Harutyunyan once called “progressive nostalgia”—they quote perestroika’s optimism precisely to measure today’s frustrations.

Seen in hindsight, 3rd Floor was not a footnote but a hinge: it pried open the Soviet frame so that ACT, NPAK and the current boom of NGOs, residencies and graffiti crews could step through. Its members asked whether anyone could be an artist; their descendants ask whether art can still change the terms of citizenship.

AMCA’s mission is to map that conversation as it spreads across decades and disciplines. Our upcoming digital archive will host interviews, photo-galleries and curriculum guides on 3rd Floor and ACT. Readers who possess posters, VHS footage or even half-remembered stories are invited to contribute. The revolution on the attic floor isn’t over; it has just moved online—join us there.