The “Common Breathturn” art exhibition is implemented within the Art for Regional Dialogue / ARD Project / created by the Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory / CSN Lab / to connect artists and cultural practitioners and support regional cultural dialogue, and to reflect on our common challenges and turbulent realities.
This group exhibition emerged from dialogues between Armenian and Georgian artists and curators. It brings together individuals who collectively reflect on the most unsettling events of recent years, events that have shaken our bodies, societies, and commonalities.
The opening event of the "Common Breathturns" exhibition took place on October 25 at the Gevorg Grigoryan (Giotto) Museum. The exhibition will be open to the public for one month.
Artists:
David Grigoryan
Hasmik Tangyan
lucine talalyan
Mariam Akubardia
Mishiko Sulakauri
Narek Barseghyan
Nino Zirakashvili
Roubina Margossian
Curators:
Lali Pertenava
Tigran Amiryan
Coordinators:
Arsen Abrahamyan
Harutyun Tumaghyan
Nanor Hovanessian
Common Breathurn__
“a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together”
Ecclesiastes 3:5
We began our dialogue by speaking about our anxieties. We talked about what shakes us today, what divides us and sends us into fragmentation and solitude. We spoke of this uneasiness both within and around us, and poetry, it seemed, appeared as consolation, and among them Celan’s Breathturn, and its readings in Armenian and Georgian. It seemed that poetry might take us away from brutal reality. Yet poetry turned out to be closer to our reality than anything else.
The time to gather stones, do I convey
that properly?
— this time stretched on endlessly
and shamefully:
all the rocks and pebbles are now
gathered,
a tremendous wall is built around me
so high that,
if the time ever comes to cast away
stones
I probably won’t be able
to toss the lightest pebble over it.
From Life is Stones by Zviad Ratiani
Zviad Ratiani is a poet from Georgia, is a translator of Paul Celan, currently imprisoned because of his political action that became an act of support against the silencing of free expression and the arts, and the systemic abuse of human rights.
Our conversations about poetry and resistance unfolded against the backdrop of transforming realities; Armenian society was drawn into one of the region’s largest wars. In Georgia, a radical political shift left society grappling with fractured dreams.
Our bodies were pushed from silent stillness into a frantic race through smoky, thickened air. Migration surges and erupts from post-pandemic stillness, from the quiet that follows crisis, and from the wars that continue to reshape our borders and bodies. We march in protests, we run to escape, we leave and depart, we migrate and host migrants, moving our bodies through space, breathless from haste. In the not-so-distant past, we feared breathing freely, wary of inhaling harm. We did not even realise that this pause was only a moment of stillness – a breath before we came to a reality where calmness would become a mere memory.
We inhaled but were denied the exhale, leaving a cloud of uneasiness within us.
In our new realities, societies remain patriarchal, hostile to others, polarised and filled with hate and intolerance, traces of the colonial past. Our cultures bear the same scars and divisions as our bodies and our states, with their fragile and shifting boundaries. We try to cross borders that are closed for us. We long for the homes that we can no longer return to. We suffocate in toxic air – alone, separated, isolated.
-- Look at the map — see how close we are.
-- Look at us — see how far apart we are, yet anxiety remains the one thing we share.
It knows no borders: what troubles one inevitably resonates in another, even if left unspoken. Our breath becomes collective — anxious, attentive, shared. In this collective breathing, in our breathturn, every inhale and exhale echoes in others, tracing shared anxieties and fragile hopes.
Breathing in turn — -
Artists from Armenia and Georgia are reflecting on anxiety and survival, individual identity and state borders, freedom of movement and migration. Interweaving local narratives, they break apart the stones and pebbles that have remained around them and question whether there is still time and space to cast away stones or to gather stones together.
Lali Pertenava and Tigran Amiryan
