Arts & Culture

While wandering through spaces without a predetermined route or destination, allowing herself to be guided by the contours and atmospheres of the environment, Maria Gunko reflects on the sensory and emotional imprints of the Armenian town of Goris.

Lucy Yeghiazaryan, an Armenian jazz vocalist based in New York City, explores the connections between Armenian melodies and American jazz standards in her album, “Beside the Golden Door”, creating a powerful fusion bridging cultural divides while navigating her own identity.

Aida Zilelian’s "All the Ways We Lied" follows the complex lives of the Manoukian sisters in Queens, New York. Tackling themes of trauma, identity, and resilience, Zilelian presents a raw, authentic portrayal of a middle-class immigrant family grappling with their past and present. A review by Christopher Atamian.

A 36-hour bus ride from Yerevan to Istanbul, passing through Georgia due to the closed Turkey-Armenia border, explores the lives, struggles and surprising bonds among the women struggling to make a living known as “bazaarchis”. It also reveals hidden stories of women “beaten down by their destiny.”

Many know Vava Sarkis as a muse and model for French Fauvists Henri Matisse and Raul Dufy. But few know that Vava was a successful artist in her own right, revered by many art connoisseurs around the world.

“Homeing” is a fluid process of habituating and domesticating the ever-changing world, where movement—whether migration, modern nomadism, or displacement—is the rule rather than the exception. Maria Gunko writes about her relationship with Home in this next installment of “Outside In.”

Being no stranger to post-Soviet 1990s hunger, poverty, and instability in central Russia, Maria Gunko learns about the Armenian experience of the “cold and dark years” at a 2016 exhibit at Yerevan’s History Museum, and is astonished by how little is known about these events outside of Armenian society. In her latest piece, Gunko explores the happiness that comes when the electricity comes.

How can we tell an important story that has been forgotten? Arsinee Khanjian’s answer to this question has been to take the impact of the story, and make it inevitable. That is what the 2015 performance called Auction of Souls, which was again on stage at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin this year, did.

Hayasdan (Armenia) is a graphic essay that explores the relationship between contemporary Yerevan and its past. The work, by Harut Tumaghyan and Armen of Armenia (Ohanyan), is divided into three parts, each delving into the city’s socio-political and cultural context from an urban perspective.

In her next piece for “Outside In” Maria Gunko recounts her exploration of the Armenian language. Learning it for a foreigner can be tough, she says, but not as tough as it may seem at first glance. Every cloud has a silver lining.