Nazik - UN WEEK-END À L’EST

Nazik Armenakyan

Nazik Armenakyan lives in Yerevan. She is a photographer and co-founder of the documentary photography center 4Plus, and has published in numerous newspapers such as The New York Times, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde. The artist focuses on social groups living on the margins of Armenian society. Since 2005, she has initiated long-term research projects, two of which resulted in books: Survivors (2005-2015), about the survivors of the Armenian genocide, and The Stamp of Loneliness (2010-2013), about members of a closed transgender community in Yerevan.

Her serie Red Black White (2021), presented for Weekend à l’Est, centers on women living with HIV in Armenia. In 2014, the artist launched the photographic project Red Black White after learning for the first time about the existence of people living with HIV in Armenia, particularly realizing that women contract HIV through their husbands, who are mostly migrant workers. These women come from ordinary Armenian households and often learn of their HIV-positive status while already pregnant.

The subject became even more difficult and painful to approach as she met various HIV-positive women, whose testimonies were both poignant and harrowing. Nazik Armenakyan recognized the impossibility of visualizing, as a documentarian, these women and mothers who are forced to hide their status from their loved ones and society for fear of being victimized.

The inability to continue working on this subject initially led her to abandon it; however, the relationships she formed with these women, her desire to tell their stories, and the increasing number of new HIV/AIDS cases each year compelled her to take back her work. Thus, she used all the restrictions that these women, as well as herself, faced to develop the concept of the Red Black White project in 2019, transforming the impossibilities surrounding this topic into veils, fabrics, and objects.

festival special guest

André Manoukian

André Manoukian, born from Armenian parents, learned the piano and the violin before studying at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in 1977. A classically trained pianist, he developed an interest in jazz and formed a big band. In 1983, he discovered singer Liane Foly, for whom he became an (…)

festival special guest

Rima Pipoyan

Rima Pipoyan is s one of the pioneers of modern ballet and contemporary dance in Armenia. She is a choreographer, director, and dancer. Her choreographic works have been presented in various cities of Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, Belarus, (…)