• 
• Spinnerei, Halle 14 – Center for Contemporary Art
  Leipzig, Germany

  September 14 – December 14, 2024

  Curators: Kateryna Bodyanva (UK)
  Susanna Gyulamiryan (AM)
  Anna Karpenko (BL)

  Artists: Nazik Armenakyan, Emra Gokdemir, Armine Hovhannisyan, Tatsiana Karpachova, Oksana Kazmina, Piruza Khalapyan, Kateryna Lysovenko, Denis Pankratov, Aliaxey Tolstou, Teta Tsybulnyk (Ruins Collective)

See the catalog for full information about the entire exhibition.

Curatorial Statement and Artworks from Armenia

Over the past three decades, the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict has seen ongoing wars, and gradual and regular escalation of hostilities against the Armenian population in Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh (using both international and Armenian toponym naming). These events had tragic consequences for the Armenian side, resulting in thousands of deaths and victims, including civilians. The ten-month-long blockade of Artsakh by Azerbaijan in 2022, marked by starvation and a total lack of communication, ended tragically with the forced displacement and total ethnic cleansing of over a hundred thousand Armenians in September 2023. These atrocities against civilians in Artsakh occurred under a near-total information blackout, receiving very little international media coverage.

The projects of female artists from Armenia, Nazik Armenakyan, Armine Hovhannisyan, and Piruza Khalapyan, truthfully convey information and provide artistic and documentary evidence of the large-scale Karabakh War launched by the Republic of Azerbaijan on September 27, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its immediate aftermath as well as based on the artists’ research conducted between 2020 and 2023. The artists experienced direct, prolonged engagement in various Artsakh regions, districts, and villages and their projects correlate in a dialogic, visual, and intertextual interaction, presenting the ‘microhistories’ of the war, focusing on personal biographies of people, family situations, and the histories of villages or local communities in Artsakh. This microhistorical approach offers a deeper, more nuanced examination of the war’s historical reality, in contrast to the unified and often formal approaches of macrohistory. The micro approach does not eliminate criticism of biopower and biopolitics, which refer to the legitimacy of decisions made by the absolute sovereign who controls rights, norms, and orders. Colonial occupation is accompanied by control, surveillance, secession, and ethnic cleansing. The key categories of biopower include primarily social life, which is the stronghold of the political sphere of power. However, in the current situation of unleashed wars, the issue of physical life has also become highly relevant: Today, against the backdrop of terrible wars, we can say that a ‘pandemic of death’ has become a permanent and perpetual part of our lives’.

The principles of territorial integrity of a state and the right of peoples to self-determination are generally recognized provisions of international law, where ‘national aspirations and identities must be respected; people may be dominated and governed only by their consent.’ However, the priority in contemporary biopolitics is the principle of territorial integrity, which rejects the sovereignty and rights to a safe life for small ethnicities within a given state. The concept of ‘territorial integrity’ is freely used as a ‘guarantee’ of the territorial supremacy of state power over small ethnic groups and ‘Other’ identities. Opposing this concept, we prefer to emphasize the factor of ‘land’ and the people who were forcibly expelled from it. The artworks, depict a kindergarten converted into a hospital, war-mutilated bodies, amputated human parts, abandoned domestic objects, burnt houses, and other heartbreaking evidence of a crippled or interrupted life, metaphorically identifying with a wounded land(scape): ‘The houses and the land scorched by war had turned into burnt human skin.’

Artists

Armine Hovhannisyan
Fragmented Amputations

1. Body Amputation: 3D animation, video, VR rendering, 202
2.  Body and Land: lightbox printing, 6 pieces, 90 x 30, 2023
3. Memory Objects: 7 pieces, UV 3D print, 2023-2024

Nazik Armenakyan
When the House Burns Down, 2022
1. pano, 1 piece, 3×2 m, print on wallpaper
2. photographs, 12 pieces, 75×50 cm, dibond prints (dibond mounting with aluminum subframe)

Piruza Khalapyan
[Fragmented] Memory, 2021
1. photographs, 2 pieces, 2 x 1.3 m, inject printing on photo paper
2. photographs, 10 pieces, 45.8 x 30.5 cm, dibond prints (dibond mounting with aluminum frame)