WISDOM KEEPERS: Living Symbols of the Armenian Highlands is an international exhibition presented in 2025 at the Museum of Armenian Ethnography and the National Liberation Movement in Sardarapat, Armenia. Bringing together contemporary artistic practices, archaeological objects, material culture, and research, the exhibition explores the enduring presence of the Vishap, or dragon stone, as one of the most distinctive prehistoric forms of the Armenian Highlands.
Monumental Vishapaqars once stood within highland landscapes, particularly in relation to springs, rivers, and other water sources. Rather than approaching them exclusively as archaeological remains, WISDOM KEEPERS considers their capacity to continue producing meaning in the present. Their vertical forms, symbolic imagery, relationship to landscape, and uncertain layers of interpretation become points of departure for thinking about memory, continuity, belonging, nature, and the transmission of cultural knowledge across time.
The exhibition therefore does not attempt to reconstruct the original meaning of the Vishap or translate ancient symbolism directly into contemporary terms. Instead, it establishes a dialogue between different historical periods and ways of understanding the world. Archaeological objects and elements of Armenian material culture encounter contemporary sculpture, painting, textile, installation, moving image, sound, and digital practices. Through these relationships, the Vishap shifts from an object to be observed toward a conceptual and perceptual reference through which artists investigate questions of landscape, ancestry, identity, transformation, displacement, guardianship, and collective memory.
Across the exhibition, ancient symbols appear not as fixed images to be repeated but as forms capable of generating new artistic languages. The vertical axis of the Vishap becomes associated with ascent, fragility, and continuity; serpent and dragon imagery enters conversations about transformation and inherited knowledge; carpets connect cultural memory with contemporary political and material realities; landscapes become active carriers of personal and collective experience. These different approaches resist a single interpretation, allowing the exhibition to operate through correspondence, contrast, and association.
The setting of the Museum of Armenian Ethnography and the National Liberation Movement gives this encounter an additional dimension. Within an institution dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Armenian cultural experience, contemporary works are presented alongside objects and visual languages carrying their own histories. The museum therefore becomes more than a venue: it forms part of the exhibition’s conceptual framework, bringing questions of preservation, cultural continuity, historical memory, and contemporary interpretation into direct relation.
At its core, WISDOM KEEPERS proposes that cultural heritage remains meaningful when it continues to be encountered, questioned, interpreted, and transformed. The exhibition looks toward the past not through nostalgia, nor through an attempt to recreate what has been lost, but as a means of establishing a living relationship with inherited forms and ideas.
In this context, the Vishap becomes a mediator between different temporalities: prehistoric and contemporary, material and imagined, remembered and still unknown. Its presence connects landscape with cultural memory and ancient form with contemporary artistic inquiry, suggesting that heritage can function not only as evidence of what preceded us, but also as a source from which new relationships, questions, and possible futures can emerge.
The accompanying publication presents the exhibition’s broader curatorial framework, participating artists, selected works, research materials, and further documentation of the project.
