Armen — A performance by Andrius Arutiunian — KADIST — Event — Slash Paris

Past: Saturday, November 23, 2024 2 PM → 6 PM

Armen is a performance by Armenian-Lithuanian artist Andrius Arutiunian, which will invite the audience to take a car journey through northern Paris while listening to a cassette composed by the artist, featuring samples of disco music from the Armenian diaspora.

he Paris iteration of the artist’s performance, entitled Armen (2023), is scheduled to take place at KADIST on 12 October and 23 November. Armen is a study of vernacular diasporic Armenian music. Using a personal collection of cassettes, vinyl records and VHS tapes of popular music from the 1970s to the 1990s, Andrius Arutiunian remixes and reimagines the personal and cultural memory embedded in this music. The piece exists in two forms: a record (shown at KADIST on a turntable on loop) and as a performance. This performance version of the piece is played out during the 42-minute duration of the cab ride, with the piece released on an audio cassette and experienced through a taxi’s sound system. It draws upon Arutiunian’s childhood memories of Armenia, where the sounds of blaring music from aged Mercedes-Benz taxi speakers greeted arrivals at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan. Armen’s duration is equal to the combined lengths of the cassette’s A and B sides. The cab ride while listening to the record evokes a passage of a psychogeographic journey, a hypnotic speculation into diasporic memories, historic omissions, and sonic absences.

Andrius Arutiunian is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer. In 2024, Arutiunian was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize. His work is included in the 15th Gwangju Biennale, the 17th Lyon Biennale, 15th Baltic Triennial, 14th Shanghai Biennale and the 9th Asian Art Biennale in Taiwan. In 2022, Andrius Arutiunian represented Armenia at the 59th Venice Art Biennale with a solo show Gharib. Other selected shows include Centre Pompidou (Paris), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), M HKA (Antwerp), Sapieha Palace (Vilnius), Stroom (The Hague), Survival Kit 13 (Riga), FACT (Liverpool), Rewire (The Hague), CTM festival (Berlin), Meduza (Vilnius), and Contemporary Art Centre (Vilnius).

Departure every hour: 2pm, 3pm, 4pm, 5pm and 6pm (3 spots available per slot) — Duration of the performance: between 45 min and 1 hour, depending on traffic — Meeting point: KADIST Paris, 21, rue des Trois Frères 75018 Paris (drop off at the same location) — Registration required — 

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