Initiative: INKNAGIR literary club

4 meetings/lectures were held during Mark Nishanean’s visit.

The topics were:

1. Eduard Saidi’s humanitarian and anti-humanitarian criticism

2. From Shelling till Franz Kafka and Daniel Varujan

3. Lord Byron and the national philology

4. Interrupted Myth

The meetings were aimed at presenting and analyzing the phenomena of “Art, Myth & Politics” in the context of Eastern and Western literature, in terms of their relations, similarities, influences and gaps.

4 meetings/lectures were held during Mark Nishanean’s visit.

The topics were:

1. Eduard Saidi’s humanitarian and anti-humanitarian criticism

2. From Shelling till Franz Kafka and Daniel Varujan

3. Lord Byron and the national philology

4. Interrupted Myth

The meetings were aimed at presenting and analyzing the phenomena of “Art, Myth & Politics” in the context of Eastern and Western literature, in terms of their relations, similarities, influences and gaps.

4 meetings/lectures were held during Mark Nishanean’s visit.

The topics were:

1. Eduard Saidi’s humanitarian and anti-humanitarian criticism

2. From Shelling till Franz Kafka and Daniel Varujan

3. Lord Byron and the national philology

4. Interrupted Myth

The meetings were aimed at presenting and analyzing the phenomena of “Art, Myth & Politics” in the context of Eastern and Western literature, in terms of their relations, similarities, influences and gaps.

4 meetings/lectures were held during Mark Nishanean’s visit.

The topics were:

1. Eduard Saidi’s humanitarian and anti-humanitarian criticism

2. From Shelling till Franz Kafka and Daniel Varujan

3. Lord Byron and the national philology

4. Interrupted Myth

The meetings were aimed at presenting and analyzing the phenomena of “Art, Myth & Politics” in the context of Eastern and Western literature, in terms of their relations, similarities, influences and gaps.

“Armenia’s Official Political Culture and the  ACT Avant-Garde Group”

The series were filmed in April  2008 at Utopiana.

Part 1: http://actv.am/en/2008/04/vardan-azadyan-armenian-political-utopianas-part-1/                                                          Part 2: http://actv.am/en/2008/04/vardan-azatyan-the-mines-of-soviet-armenia-1960-70-part-2/
Part 3: http://actv.am/en/2008/04/vardan-azatyan-the-beginning-of-mass-media-culture-part-3/

Landscape Garden –  Gohar Karapetyan and David Nubaryan, Open University of Armenia, Department of  Fine Arts.
Qo-char City – Sahak Poghosyan                                                                                                                                                                                        Citizens of Empty Space -in cooperation with the Swiss artistic group “Laps”

War Economy. Peace economy. An Alternative to Cultural Development

The lecture focuses on cultural economy, which is forming in the process of globalization. Two types of economic management are singled out. These differ from each other in relationship-building, product management, policies of product circulation, consumption volumes and market expectations. Based on the mentioned characteristics, economies can be categorized as War Economy and Peace Economy. Karoyan argues that Armenian cultural economy has to reform and adopt the policies of Peace Economy, especially in terms of its product management and circulation. This would allow Armenia to collaborate and participate in the deve­lopment of global economic models and agendas.

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Nazareth Karoyan is an art critic, free-lance exhibition curator, and the president of AICA Armenia. Since the 1980s, he has been active in developing the contemporary art scene of Armenia.  He is the co-foun­der of the artistic movement “3rd floor”, the first private art galleries Goyak, Ex-Voto, and the art magazine In Vitro. Presently, he organizes training courses in exhibition skills and art criticism. In his numerous essays, articles and lectures discusses where the art system is heading to, how it ties in with socio-political contexts and what communication exists between artistic issues in post-Soviet Armenia and Europe.

The topic is “Labour”

Lecture-Discussion with Ara Nedolyan

The Insolubility of the Global Crisis and Solution Methods

The Global Crisis is not a simple synthesis of unfavorable private economic factors, but rather the bankruptcy of the existing social and economic model. No modern society has yet unreserve­dly accepted a human’s right to life. Utopian Encounters project relates this right to “labour”.

Labour means that a person offers him/herself, his/her body and time to somebody else’s temporary authority in return for money – the right to life. As a result, economies around the world, from America to Armenia, tend to produce jobs instead of results/money, multiplying ineffec­tive and extensive labour, in the end spending more than producing.

All economies in the world accumulate debts instead of savings. Such a system is capable of nothing but the further exploitation of humans, nature and social benefits cuts. It is unable to produce a future that will be better than the present.

During the lecture, alternatives to the existing socio-economic model are presented and dis­cussed.

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Ara Nedolyan is a theatre critic, publicist, brainstorming games technician. He has graduated from the Institute of Fine-Arts and Theatre.  He has worked at the National Academy of Sciences, the State Department of Special Programs, the Supreme Council and the National Cine­mateque. He is a member of expert groups such as Scientific Industrial Union, Civic Union, Union of Socialist Forces, Research Group for Foreign Policy and Socialist Conference. He is the co-founder of the Gnosis and Artsiv (Eagle) magazines.

Libertarian socialism is based on the principle that each person belongs to him/herself; he/she is the owner of his/her body and mind. The reason why it is difficult to understand the above mentioned statement is that we are not able to control the beginning and the end of our lives – our birth and death.

Libertarian Socialism is a political philosophy, which struggles against authoritarian violence and social hierarchy. It excludes any action imposed on a person when he/she is forced to act against his/her own will. This is a political theory that aims to build a society based on the princi­ples of equality and free agreement.

The expression “DVD revolution” was used for the first time by the opposition leader Levon Ter-Petrosyan (which as he said, he had heard from the talks among the protesters) during the 2008 presidential election demonstrations in Yerevan. Activist groups produced and distributed DVDs which contained information about demonstrations, meetings, activist actions and speeches delivered by their leaders as well as video documentations of the clash with the police and special forces on March 1. Using a DVD format made it possible to widely circulate this material. But they could not be aired on TV because of strict censorship and if they were published on the web, the scope of the circulation would be limited due to the inaccessibility of the  internet in Armenia. The manifesto DVD REVOLUTION was written by six artists at the same time  (Tigran Khachatryan, Yuri Manvelyan, Arman Grigoryan, Karen Alekyan, Karen Barseghyan, Arman Martirosyan). It reflects on the revolutionary process in Armenia and proposes an alternative artistic “revolutionary program”.

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Arman Grigoryan – artist, curator, was born in 1960 in Yerevan. He is the creator of the Armenian pop art and one of the founders of the “3rd Floor” artistic movement which was one of the first alternative art movements in the Soviet Union. From the early 1980s on, he has been attacking the discursive clichés that have conquered both the visual environment and the language. He is now utilizing mobile phones for this attack.