At the National Gallery of Armenia, an exhibition places thousands of years between two kinds of object and asks them to speak to each other. On one side stand the vishaps — the prehistoric dragon stones raised across the Armenian highlands. On the other, contemporary sculptural works that carry the same instinct forward: to give weight, history, and a particular intelligence to raw material.
The show sits within the international project “Contested Pasts, Uncertain Future(s),” which examines how societies inherit, argue over, and reimagine their own histories. Seen in that frame, the totem stops being a relic and becomes a question — what do we still choose to carve into permanence, and why?
For ArtInsight, the exhibition is a clear statement of what we look for in a work: not decoration, but an object that changes the room it stands in. The oldest and the newest pieces here share a refusal to be background.
