Undoing Denials at the Venice Biennale’s Armenian Pavilion

Neery Melkonian

 

Neery Melkonian, a New York-based art curator and scholar, passed away on July 2, 2016, after battling cancer. She was a gifted scholar with a keen eye for different manifestations of Armenian contemporary art. In her memory, we reproduce the following essay, first published in the catalogue for Armenity, which accompanied the Armenian pavilion of the same name at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The Armenity exhibition won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the Biennale last year.

Art of Armenian diaspora wins at Venice Biennale: Worldwide weeds

Avedis Hadjian

 

The Armenian pavilion, hosted in a Venetian monastery that has sheltered the culture for 300 years, won the Golden Lion this year.

 

“The botanical gardens at Salerno were in a poor state after decades of dereliction, and when they started renovating them, they found strange wild plants and exotic flowers blooming,” said Silvina Der-Meguerditchian, an Armenian-Argentine artist based in Berlin. She displayed her new installation, Treasures, at this year’s Venice Biennale, with 17 other, mainly diaspora artists (www.armenity.net), in the Armenian pavilion at the Mekhitarist order’s monastery of St Lazarus of the Armenians, on a tiny island in the Venetian lagoon. She had recreated a manuscript, a compilation of folk medicine recipes her great-grandmother wrote down in a notebook in Buenos Aires more than 70 years ago.