Seek not the paths of the ancients; Seek that which the ancients sought. Matsuo Basho
From 23 to 26 September 2026, Yerevan will host an international transdisciplinary project bringing together two interconnected and equal components: the conference Contested Pasts, Uncertain Future(s): Heritage, Memory, and History and the exhibition Prehistoric Sculpture and Contemporary Totems.
Taking place across Yerevan State University and the National Gallery of Armenia, the project creates a shared platform for contemporary art, scholarly research, archaeology, philosophy, cultural heritage, and material culture. Rather than treating these fields as separate forms of knowledge, it brings them into dialogue around a common set of questions: how societies interpret the past, how memory is constructed and transmitted, and how material traces of history continue to shape cultural identities and understandings of the present.
The conference approaches these questions through interdisciplinary scholarly exchange, examining the relationships between heritage, memory, historical interpretation, cultural loss, and responsibility. Alongside it, the exhibition develops a parallel investigation through artistic and spatial experience. Prehistoric Vishap stones, contemporary sculptures, installations, and audiovisual works are brought into proximity, creating encounters between objects separated by radically different historical contexts yet connected through questions of form, symbolism, landscape, ritual, and collective memory.
Central to the project is an understanding of heritage not as a fixed record that belongs exclusively to the past, but as a living process of interpretation, transmission, and transformation. Archaeological objects, historical narratives, contemporary artworks, and scholarly perspectives become different ways of approaching the same fundamental question: how do we establish relationships with what has been inherited, and what new meanings can emerge from those relationships?
The project therefore does not attempt to reconstruct the past or establish a single interpretation of it. Instead, it creates a space in which different periods, disciplines, objects, and perspectives can coexist and challenge one another. Through this encounter, the past becomes something that can be reconsidered from the position of the present while also opening questions about the futures we construct from it.
The four-day program culminates in ECLIPSE, when the conference and exhibition converge at the National Gallery of Armenia. Conceived as the point at which the project’s two trajectories temporarily align, ECLIPSE brings scholarly inquiry and artistic experience into a single shared environment, emphasizing the project’s central proposition: that new understandings can emerge when different forms of knowledge are allowed to meet.
The accompanying project publication provides the complete curatorial and academic framework, participating contributors, program, artworks, and further documentation.
