To coincide with the 8th edition of the Un Week-End à l'Est festival, which this year focuses on the artistic scene in Yerevan, Armenia, a unique dialogue between visual artist Melik Ohanian and film-maker Andrei Ujica highlights a major figure in the 7th art, the film-maker Artavazd Pelechian.

As rare as he is celebrated, he is the ‘missing link in the true history of cinema’, in the words of Serge Daney who, along with Jean-Luc Godard, was one of the most ardent promoters of his work in France in the early 1990s.

Moderated by contemporary art curator Lilit Sokhakian.

Melik Ohanian, a French visual artist of Armenian origin, adopts a multidisciplinary and politically committed approach to his artistic practice. Through sculpture, photography, film and installation, his conceptual and poetic work explores notions of displacement as political, social and cultural phenomena, as well as concepts of time and the nature of individual and collective memory.

His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in France and abroad. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including the biennials of São Paulo (2004), Berlin (2004), Sydney (2004, 2016), Moscow (2005), Gwangju (2006), Seville (2006), Venice (2007, 2015), Sharjah (2011) and the Lyon Biennial (2005, 2017).

In 2015, he won the Prix Marcel Duchamp, and took part in the Armenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which was awarded the Golden Lion for best national pavilion. His permanent installation in Geneva's Parc Trembley, Les Réverbères de la Mémoire, won the Visarte Prize in Zurich in 2019.

After studying literature, Andrei Ujica decided in 1990 to devote himself to cinema and co-directed Videograms of a Revolution (1992) with Harun Farocki. This film, which explores the relationship between political power and the media in Europe at the end of the Cold War, was a landmark. His second film, Out of the Present (1995), tells the story of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who spent ten months in the Mir space station while the Soviet Union ceased to exist on Earth. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu (2010) concludes his trilogy dedicated to the end of communism. With TWST | Things We Said Today (2024) Ujica turns to the emergence of mass culture.

Andrei Ujica has also directed two films commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain: 2 Pasolini (2000/2020) and Unknown Quantity with Paul Virilio and Svetlana Alexievitch (2002-2005).

Lilit Sokhakyan, curator of contemporary art, moved to Paris in 2012, where she began collaborating with the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain on various exhibitions and projects, notably related to the artist Artavazd Pelechian. Together with the Fondation Cartier team, Lilit assisted Pelechian in the creation of his latest film La Nature, she was responsible for the creation of the website entirely dedicated to Pelechian's life and filmography, as well as the distribution of his works in several international festivals, including New York, Amsterdam, Milan and Venice. She continues to support Artavazd Pelechian in his European projects and exhibitions, as well as in the development of his new opera project.
 

Photo credits: © mtetard © Hrair Hawk Khatcherian