Armenia 2022

Title: Gharib
Commissioner: Arayik Khzmalyan, Deputy Minister of Education, Science, Culture and Sport
Curator: Anne Davidian, Elena Sorokina
Exhibitors: Andrius Arutiunian

For the 59th Venice Biennale, Armenia presents “Gharib“,  is a solo show by sound artist and composer Andrius Arutiunian. Through several new sound works and installations, the exhibition is focused on a single word – gharīb – which denotes a contradictory sense of belonging and estrangement that permeates Arabic, Armenian, and Farsi imaginaries. The notion has long been associated with the underground, clandestine activities of music making, illegal social clubs, psychotropic substance trade, and the political margins.

Modes of political and musical organisation, sonic dissent, and playful oscillations between mystic thought and charlatanism compose the cosmology of the Gharīb Pavilion. Here, the gharīb presents itself as a form of dissonance with Western-influenced understandings of time, rhythm, and attunement. A certain musical score emerges, dotted by the voices of the unheard, the disappeared, and the radical.