Armenian Season in Paris

The «Armenian Season» in Paris, at the Maison d’Europe et d’Orient

The Paris-based Maison d’Europe et d’Orient, a cross-cultural organization directed by Dominique Dolmieu, organizes this month an «Armenian Season» to commemorate the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. A series of events, including exhibitions, lectures, concerts, and screenings, will be organized between the 10th and 30th of April 2015. The festival officially began yesterday, on the 10th of April, with the opening of Anna Ádám’s solo show.

The young Franco-Hungarian visual artist has already exposed last summer in the Modern Art Museum, Yerevan, Armenia. For her exhibition in Paris, she presents a series of works, including photographs, polaroids, and a textile installation, exclusively elaborated in Armenia during her artist-in-residency program in Yerevan.

Her projects are built around the intersection where personal memory cross collective memory, and the narrator’s history cross History, with a capital “H”. Her main row material are personal narratives, storytelling and spoken words of her entourage or of unknown people. The photographs, videos, and voice-recordings she makes catch the present, but also remind us of what we no longer have. On the other hand, the photographs or prints she finds or buys are fragments of an “anonymous estate”, and where each picture relates its own story and raises a veil on the common past. By intervening (sewing, embroidering, drawing, writing…) on these “faceless” elements, she (re)interprets them in a single subjective perspective.

Anna Ádám’s projects range from interdisciplinary individual works to collaborative productions (with other artists, dancers or designers), curatorial projects and critical writing (Le Monde Diplomatique, Hungary). Her works were shown in museums, galleries, and art fairs through Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, and Hungary.