Description: VANYERE, HD colour digital video, live recorded sound, 3′ 10″, 2025.
Images taken at the control room of ROT54 Orgov Radio-Optical Telescope (Herouni Mirror Radio Telescope), in Orgov, Mount Aragats, Armenia. Built in 1975-1985, active until 1990 and shortly in 2012. Now it is in decay. Further information here.
The title “VANYERE” is derived from inverting the syllables of “Yerevan” representing a conceptual abstraction that contrasts with the realistic imagery and symbolizes my incomprehension of the Armenian language and script. VANYERE is the brother-video of KARKHACH, also inspired by my experiences in Armenia.
Radio telescopes capture signals from cosmic events, providing insights into the universe’s history and evolution. Because of the immense distances, these signals take time to reach Earth, often showing us objects as they were in the past, not as they currently are. For instance, signals from a distant galaxy depict its state billions of years ago, by which time, that galaxy might have evolved into a different cosmic structure. Or the light from a supernova explosion might now signify the presence of a black hole.
In front of such giant dimensions of time and space, artist felt the brevity of her own existence.
The abandoned control room, with its fallen clock hands, faded numbers, and cryptic abbreviations on hollowed-out instruments, seemed like a mammoth graveyard, despite being built just a few decades ago. This deepened my sense of vanity.
The sound is recorded live from three street musicians playing flute, accordion, and drum in front of the Geghard Monastery, Ararat province of Armenia, in November 2024.
The popular music, which repetitions progressively increase in speed, contrasts with the scientific instruments of ROT54 from a specific political era.
Regina Huebner Regina Huebner was born in 1964 in Villach, Austria. She lives in Villach and Rome, Italy. She has two daughters.
She graduated at the Ortweinschule in Graz in Graphic-Design in 1985 and, in 1990, at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome in Sculpture. Recent awards and recognitions include CALLIOPE Join the Dots, outstanding Austrian women in art and science by Austrian Ministry for European and International Affairs, in 2024; The Prize of Culture to the City of Villach in 2022; The Decoration of Honour in Gold to her birth town, in 2021. Ambassador of the Independent Republic of Užupis in 2023 and “Person of the Year for Culture”, elected by the lecturers of Austrian newspaper Kleine Zeitung Carinthia, in 2021. Winner of the competition Monument to Paul Watzlawick, in 2020. Guest Researcher at IMèRA Institute for Advanced Study of Aix-Marseille University with Percepion of Self and Nonself in Life, in 2019.
She conceives long-term projects, that develop further, over time. Her artworks are interconnected across her whole artwork yet maintaining their independency. Estimation and deep friendships have led to collaborations with personalities from visual art, literature, music, and science, including dialogues and symposia. She involves special key figures, the so-called Protagonists, where the individual destiny is put on a larger scale. Their contributions are constituent of the artwork itself, like in Anonymus dedicated to Vally and in Dear Cell or in still ongoing projects like relationships and reflection and absorption.
She uses different means and media, from experimental photography, video, subjects and objects, environment, sound, to performance, text and programs, including theorization and concept.
Themes and items often have (auto)biographical connotations and treat questions on communication, perception, relation, time, under the perspective of feelings and subjectivity or from the opposite and the contrary. She conceives long-term projects, that develop further, over time. Her artworks are interconnected across her whole lifework of 40 years, yet maintaining their independency.
