Yerevan in March

  • Johannes Christopher Gerard (Germany/Netherlands)

    An interdisciplinary and collaborative project

    Artistic director: Susanna Gyulamiryan

    The project is kindly supported by the Goethe-Zentrum Yerevan, der Deutschen Botschaft Yerevan and Stroom, The Hague (Netherlands).

‘Yerevan in March’ is an interdisciplinary and collaborative project with the focus on the city of Yerevan with all of its significant changes during the post-Soviet era. The content of the project refers to the urban matters and social environment of the city, which are interpreted and reflected metaphorically, offering a (re)cognizable combination of signifiers with a particular signified. The project consists of a live performance, a video, and a series of photographs.

The live performance has been created in cooperation with students of the Institute of Theater and Cinematography.
Participants were given full freedom to perform and ‘play’ with signifiers, while the artist excluded the idea of the predominance of one medium (a six-part video work) over another (freely interpreted) performative ‘narration.’

Special thanks to the Institute of Theater and Cinematography (ITC) in Yerevan, the students of the institute, and Anna Heqeqyan, the Dean of the Department of Theater at ITC.

Johannes Christopher Gerard lived and worked (long term/temporarily) in different locations and countries. Among others, Germany, Ireland, Spain, The Netherlands, Argentinia, Australia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Myanmar, China, Taiwan and Russia. This kind of lifestyle and art career had at the end a great impact about his vision and concepts as an artist. To be on the move, curiosity of crossing boundaries, nowhere feeling home and a certain restlessness became an important source of inspiration. Themes within of his work have a vision towards identity, relations (between humans and humans-environment), transition, boundaries, lost, loneliness, topics about sexuality, inner strife, time, destruction, death. Accordingly he pays close intention to the candid subtle details within the environments we build or live in. His interpretations are at the end embedded experiments through changing observations and analysis of our visible and non-visible environments and human behavior.

Johannes Gerard studied printmaking at School of Print and Design in Cologne, Germany and Visual Arts at Dun Laogharie School of Art and Design, (today IADT) Dublin, Ireland. Since 1981, he has participated in art/film festivals, exhibitions and art projects in Europe, Asia, Australia, North and South Americas and Africa. From 2013 onward, he has been focusing on collaboration projects with other artists and general audience. In 2017, he developed and created in St. Petersburg, Russia the participatory performance/workshop ‘Unfolding-Unwrapped,’ which is based on the concepts of Social Sculpture. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany and The Hague, Netherlands.