Living Room
In September 2023, the long-standing conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh escalated with a large-scale and intensive military attack by Azerbaijan, leading to its control over the entire territory. After this incident, fear of ethnic cleansing led to a mass exodus of Karabakh Armenians to Armenia.
The Living Room is a connecting space for displaced communities from Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian artists and international artists and cultural workers collaborating in varied social and artistic forms. The aim is to encourage those who have lost their homes to resist a permanent self-identification as victims, to support artists to be engaged with creative and grass-rooted, conflict-sensitive approaches to creating a peaceful future.
One of the focus areas of the Living Room activities is to foster socially engaged art practices as a powerful method for peaceful conflict transformation, providing a safe space for exchange, learning, and cooperation. The physical space, located in a peripheral district of Yerevan, is open, accessible, and continuously evolving as a living space for art and communities from Armenia and around the world.
Art and Social Transformation Lab
For its first international activity in the Living Room, artasfoundation invited artists, art educators, researchers, and cultural practitioners to join a seven-day laboratory on art and social transformation. The laboratory was designed as a learning and experimenting space for 10 – 12 participants to create artistic practices engaging with communities, encouraging them to take control of their lives and deal with past, present and future struggles through creative methods.
We wish for a supportive community of practice to grow to empower artists in their interaction with the uncertainty in today’s world, re-examining of the role of contemporary art in peaceful social transformation.
Participating artists and cultural workers have used the laboratory as a space to collectively develop their project ideas. As a result, three projects will be realised in the Living Room:
Where is your Safe Space #7, a performance art project led by Tereza Davtyan, curator, Petros Ghazanchyan, dancer and Inna Ghazaryan, dancer. The project is an evolving performance art series that explores the multifaceted concept of safe spaces in our increasingly complex world.
Transparent – Narratives from Artsakh, a project led by Stella Loretsyan, writer and Lusine Mlke-Galstyan, musician. The project will support ten Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians in sharing their personal stories transforming them to art works showcasing through two events and intensive involvement of local and international media to reach a wider audience.
Home is where your Heart is, an art therapy project led by Ani Galstyan, visual artist, Eliza Baghdiyan, musician and visual artist, Timofey Bichkov, art historian and visual artist, and Anna Tenenbaum, visual artist. The project aims to support forcibly displaced people to deal with experienced traumas.
Besides the activities organised by artasfoundation, the Living Room will also host other projects that simply need a space to work. The physical space is accessible for artists, organisations and communities involved in social transformation and looking for a space to practice, rehearse, gather, exchange, perform or simply meet.
Place and Year
Yerevan, 2024
Participants
Tereza Davtyan, Ani Galstyan, Petros Ghazanchyan, Inna Ghazaryan, Eliza Baghdiyan, Stella Loretsyan, Yana Avanesyan, Anna Tenenbaum, Timofey Bichkov, Lusine Mlke-Galstyan
Interpreter
Maria Andryan
Project Management
Shoghakat Mlke-Galstyan (artasfoundation)
Rana Yazaji (artasfoundation)
Financial Contributions
Project ECHO
Private Donors
The terminology in the projects and their titles is in the responsibility of the artists and does not have to align with the spelling used by the artasfoundation. The use of names and titles by artasfoundation, particularly in regard to conflict regions, are not understood as implying any form of recognition or non-recognition by the foundation or as having any other political connotation whatsoever.