Friday, April 28, 2017

Tigran Amiryan is an independent curator, contemporary culture researcher, Ph.D in Literary Studies. For years now, Tigran Amiryan’s main interest revolves around the issue of narrativization of both individual and collective memory in contemporary culture. In 2013, Amiryan authored a monograph on the falsification of historical past, paranoidal mentality, and collective amnesia.

His recent years have been devoted to self-narrative theory as applied to visually narrativized texts. In 2015-2016, Amiryan developed and presented a course of lectures at different academic and art platforms in Morocco, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Russia. Presently, Tigran’s research and curating projects are twofold: on one hand, he looks into narrativization of personal/individual experience, artistic (fictional) representation and history of the Self, biographies; on the other hand, the emerging curator focuses on urban space and environment that keep the memory of people’s lives despite being constantly subjected to oblivion and destruction.

In the framework of GeoAIR residency, Tigran Amiryan worked on the art doc project “Kukia Alphabet.” It researches the aspects of multi-ethnicity in Tbilisi and looks at its dynamics through particular sites of memory – cemeteries. The project explores pantheons of famous people, and graveyards of ordinary people belonging to particular ethnic or religious groups; how these places emerge and move within the city. While some of them are associated with specific groups, there are also those, which unite people with different backgrounds. Kukia is one of such examples that show how the diversity of the city can be observed through the headstones in various languages and alphabets.

As a result, publication “Kukia Alphabet” and an accompanying poster were created. The presentation of the publication and research findings took place at the Caucasian House in Tbilisi, on June 9.

TV interview about the project at Public Broadcaster’s program “C Studio” can be found on this link.

More details at Art Prospect Residency Program page.

Residency is supported by CEC ArtsLink in the framework of Platform Art Prospect project.