As part of the Armenian Contemporary Art lecture series supported by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Angela Harutyunyan, Director of the Art History program of American University of Beirut, held lecture under the title of Exorcizing the ‘Soviet’: Resurrected Ghosts and Living Heroes in Contemporary Art in Armenia on December 7th, 2018 at the Hrant Dink Foundation.

In the first part of the speech, Harutyunyan mentioned about her book named of “The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the ‘Painterly Real,’ 1987–2004” that published in 2017. The book describes the state of contemporary art in Armenia and the difficulty of continuing the autonomy of contemporary art at period of Soviet Union. At the first part concentrated on historical and theoretical knowledges.
Harutyunyan, who talked about art and art practices, also spoke about the traces of the historical period in the epoch of Stalinism, which she defined as the temporality or modernity of art in the second part of the speech.