CYLAND Video Archive Program on 5th GYUMRI ART WEEK / City and Time
CYLAND Video Archive Program
Curated by Victoria Ilyushkina (CYLAND)
The program will be exhibited at the Gyumri Technology Center, with the opening scheduled for August 7 at 19:00.
Venue: Gyumri Technology Center
CYLAND Video Archive Program is a part of International Gyumri Art Week.
International Gyumri Art Week is an annual festival for contemporary art in the city of Gyumri, Armenia. It is designed to become a catalyst for artistic research and experimentation in the region and to provoke debates on the actual cultural and societal processes.
The 5th International Gyumri Art Week 2026 explores the theme “City and Time,” examining the city as a place where past, present, and future intersect and continuously reshape one another. Through exhibitions, installations, performances, and public programs, the festival invites audiences to reflect on urban memory, transformation, and new visions of the future.
The festival explores how a city is shaped over time and how time “lives” within the city. It brings together the past, present and future, presenting the city as a living organism that is constantly changing and reshaping itself.
In today’s world, where digitalization, demographic change and the challenges of sustainable development are becoming increasingly complex, there is a need for new thinking about the relationship between time and the city. These challenges do not merely disrupt established urban paradigms; they also create new opportunities to rethink urban life and its structure.
This year’s festival focuses on the interactions within the city, revealing the meeting ground between the organized city and the free imagination of art. Urban life is often structured by clear planning and regulation principles, while art offers spontaneous and experimental interruptions that expand the boundaries of how these systems are perceived.
The festival views art not only as a means of expression but also as a critical tool that can reveal, reimagine, and reconstruct our understanding of the city.
Concept: Sargis Hovhannisyan
Places
Gyumri Technology Center
Artists
Starting with an excerpt from an Albanian feature film from the communist era, in which a boy dreams of the construction of a modern city, “Every Epoch Dreams the Next” revolves around the historical and current transformation processes of urban space. The film reflects on the power of images, on historical and contemporary utopias, and on how power structures can override the common good and the general public.
Memory is not a static record but a landscape prone to erosion. This work explores the fracture in sanity that arises when the world we remember no longer matches the world we see, navigating the shared shadows of empires found in two distant places — Hong Kong and Armenia. A geography of the mind that persists even when the external city becomes unrecognizable.
Mythical landscapes, the utopia of wilderness, and the capture of the moment. Nature serves as a mirror of, or a backdrop for, the self. “V” documents, without comment, human interactions with nature and landscapes in Iceland. It observes, among other things, the tension between direct experience and the labor of (self-)representation, the ways nature serves as a symbol or projection screen for our inner states, and the intersection of biological and geological time.
In “I am One”, a collection of quotes about uniqueness and individuality by celebrities and lesser-known authors (from Bill Gates or Karl Lagerfeld to Simone de Beauvoir) is heard over images of a densely built-up, highly populated urban area and its architecture. The narrative is well-known but contradicted by the images, generating an encounter between collective and individual perspectives on singularity.
“Decay” is part of a series exploring the fading of traditional culture, focusing on bread-baking practices. It draws on 3D scenes collected by the artist during field trips to rural settlements in Armenia, undertaken with a group of other creatives. These communities center baking around sourdough, preserved and nourished year-round, and the underground oven, tonyr. The video features piles of lavash, cut bread, and handmade tools used for sifting flour and placing dough. Captured from real environments and transformed through generative algorithms, the scenes gradually dissolve, distorted through subtle, glitch-like interventions. The work reflects on cultural erosion while emphasizing the need to preserve such practices for resilient communities, economies, and ecosystems.
