EXHIBITION: A WISTFUL GAZE – TOWARD THE FUTURE. SILVINA DER MEGUERDITCHIAN

Curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher.

After more than twenty years, Silvina Der Meguerditchian presents her first solo exhibition in Armenia, A Wistful Gaze – Toward the Future. At the NPAK, the exhibition brings together works that interweave personal memories with collective narratives and explore questions of belonging, loss and tradition.

The video work Care to Care (2024) depicts a quiet, almost ritualistic gesture: the combing of hair. It is an act that evokes trust and closeness, whilst simultaneously pointing to cultural practices of togetherness. Between intimacy and performance, hair becomes a vessel for memory, belonging and personal history. In Frou Flou (2023/2025), hair is braided into sculptural forms – luminous, synthetic, individual. They bear female names and tell stories that defy the norm.

From the five-part video series Qanun Archives, the works Buenos Aires/Berlin (2025) and Armenia (2025) will be shown: the qanun, deeply rooted in the Armenian musical heritage, connects places and people across vast geographical and cultural spaces: from Cilicia via Cairo and Paris to Buenos Aires and Berlin. The work traces its history as well as the people who build, play and preserve it.

The installation The Silence of Stones (2022/2023) is being restaged at the NPAK. Here, two disparate materials come together to form a quiet reflection on loss and the deliberate erasure of cultural heritage.

Silvina Der Meguerditchians’ work is closely linked to her own biography: born in Buenos Aires as the granddaughter of Armenian grandparents, she moved to West Berlin in the late 1980s. Her work does not provide answers, but opens up spaces for questions about origin, identity and what shapes us. In 2015, she was part of the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, which was awarded the Golden Lion.