On March 15, 50 people filled the tiny space of Yerevan’s Mirzoyan Library to participate in an event put on jointly by HAYP Pop Up Gallery and the Yerevan’s Underbelly’s ‘Let’s Talk’. This event, which is part of a series of talks by ‘Let’s Talk’, was about Linda Nochlin’s landmark article, ‘Why are there no great women artists.’

This piece takes a critical look at how western art historians and the art world created an environment in which women were excluded from participating in art and being educated in art schools, and how this exclusion has been largely ignored by art historians. She states that the reason there have been so few great women artists is not because of a lack of talent, but because they were not given the opportunities to become great.

This event was a pre-educational one for HAYP Pop Up’s new exhibit ‘Lips of Pride,’ which will open on April 8, 2016, and will last for ten days. HAYP Pop Up Gallery is a gallery that creates exhibits in unexpected places throughout Yerevan. They usually use abandoned spaces and create a temporary exhibit, exploring different themes and artists. To date, they have done five exhibits, including a recent re-appropriation of a train to Gyumri. Their next exhibit, ‘Lips of Pride’, will focus on feminism in Armenia, and the sexual repression of Armenian women.

This exhibit will be sponsored by the Swiss Fund for Contemporary Art Projects.

The following is an interview with Anna Gargarian, a co-founder of HAYP Pop Up Gallery. She is currently the creative director, executive director, and the manager of HAYP Pop Up Gallery. We discussed why she wanted to work with Let’s Talk, and why HAYP Pop Up Gallery wanted to do an exhibit focusing on feminism in Armenia.

I noticed on Facebook that this is a talk with Let’s Talk by the Yerevan Underbelly.

Correct, yes

Could you briefly talk about why you approached Let’s Talk and why you chose this space to have this conversation?

We wanted to do a pre-exhibition event. We wanted to discuss this essay because it’s a pinnacle essay in terms of feminist art history in general. And we were looking for the right setting to do that. This specific location, the Mirzoyan Library, is just a place that I love. I worked with Karine Mirzoyan [a member of Yerevan’s Underbelly] as an artist and a curator, and that kind of relationship before. So it’s just a place I love to be in.

So your new exhibition is coming up and it’s called the ‘Lips of Pride’. And it’s your first exhibit that specifically talking about feminism. What inspired you to do this specific topic about feminism in Armenia?

We have been around for a little over a year now, and we have done five projects to date. And in all of these projects the artists that we have worked with were mostly male artists. And this just sort of happened this way because we just happened to meet artists here, and they just happened to be male artists. And it was hard for me to find women artists. And then I just started noticing that a lot of male artists are married to talented women artists. But they don’t present themselves often as artists. So when you ask them about their work. Oh, well, I just sort of dabble in this, or I sort of take photographs, and the work is really strong. So it has nothing to do with the quality of the work, and has more to do with self-esteem and self-confidence. And I just wanted to kind of focus on women artists for a while.

The idea for this exhibit basically happened because I was at a dinner party with some friends, one of whom is a close friend of mine who works at the women support center and also works with issues of linguistic discrimination. And she mentioned to me that the term for the labia, in Armenian is ‘amotashurter,’ which means ‘lips of shame’. And I was so shocked by that word that we went on a tangent, like you do at dinner parties. It was actually her husband who came up with the phrase ‘lips of pride’. Oh, we should do an exhibit about this. We can call it ‘lips of love’, or whatever. And he said, lips of pride. That was going to be it. But this happened maybe six months ago, and it was ruminating for a while, and we just decided to seize the opportunity and go for it now.

So, if I am correct, there will be twenty local artists, and five artists from abroad in your next exhibit? 

It’s kind of a continually growing list. The cut off and the deadline was a while ago, but we had so much interest by women artists. This was exclusively for women artists. We are not accepting male participation. We were criticized for by some feminist men who said, well you’re excluding a very interesting perspective from the discussion, and for a while I was considering it. And it didn’t seem right to have men talking about how women feel about their sexuality. Specifically, around the concept of societies’ perception of shame.  I think men can sympathize and understand, and I hope that they do, and I want them involved in the conversation but I don’t think that it’s right for them to produce art saying that they know what that experience is like, because they can’t know what that experience is like. So it’s specifically for women. We just got really interesting submissions. Even this week. And when they are interesting I can’t say no. So it’s kind of a growing list. And four of them are American Armenians. But they are American Armenians who have lived in Armenia for a short while. We also have one German artist as well.

By local, I was wondering how you defined that. By locals do you mean people who are currently living in Armenia, or do you mean people who have lived in Armenia, who have Armenian citizenship, and who plan on living in Armenia for the perceivable future?

Yeah, that’s a good question. When I say local, I mean born and raised in Armenia. One of the American artists that I mentioned lives here, so she is local in that respect, but I still consider her an American artist. So I’m thinking more on terms of a perspective, a mentality.

How do you see the future of HAYP Pop Up Gallery?  What are your plans after this exhibit? What will the next exhibit be?

That’s a pretty charged question. Because basically HAYP is a continually evolving animal. As a pop up gallery, our spaces are always different, our subjects are always different. And we try to work with different artists because one of our major goals is to support emerging artists and not to stick with always working with the same artists. Which is something you tend to see a lot here. You see similar names showing up, and there’s a lot of creative talent that needs to be listened to. So we try to stay diverse in our topics, and the creators that we are working with. In terms of the future of the gallery itself. So far we focused mostly on the Yerevan community. This is where we exhibited the most. The exception was the Gyumri train project, which was actually a train connecting to Gyumri. We basically took over various wagons of this old soviet train that was still moving. And we put a performance and installation, and had co-partners in Gyumri itself.

We would like to venture out of Yerevan to reach villages or cities even. Besides Yerevan that may not have as much access to contemporary art cultures. That’s definitely a goal for the gallery as a whole. In terms of goals for this exhibition, one of the goals is to have a chance for women to voice their personal opinions a bit. To give a chance to women artists to step up to the plate. And hopefully, yeah, there will be a continuation of the project. And we would like to take this specific project out to a village or city. I think it will have a totally different feedback from the public. Um, there’s definitely been some backlash against the project. It’s definitely been very difficult for us to find a space. We were rejected by so many spaces. Because the theme is controversial. And most of the space owners are men. Finding a space is very challenging. And I think those challenges will be worse outside of Yerevan.  Because people are a little more closed minded. But that’s the audience we really want to reach. So yeah, that’s a future goal.

Top photo: Hovig Tashjian  

(Interview conducted by Katherine Berjikian, a Birthright Armenia volunteer now working at Hetq)