YEREVAN-THE HAGUE, the Netherlands — Andrius Arutiunian (born 1991, Vilnius, Lithuania), a multifaceted conceptual artist and composer of Armenian and Lithuanian heritage, works with hybrid forms of listening, vernacular knowledge, and contemporary cosmologies. From 2010 to 2016, he studied music composition at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. His selected exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou (Paris), M HKA (Antwerp), Stroom (The Hague), Sapieha Palace (Vilnius), Survival Kit 13 (Riga), FACT (Liverpool), Rewire (The Hague), CTM Festival (Berlin), and the Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius), as well as biennials in Venice, Shanghai, Gwangju, Lyon, and the 15th Baltic Triennial. In 2023, he was a DAAD Artist-in-Residence Fellow. Since 2016, he has been a sound researcher at the Sedje Hémon Foundation in The Hague. From 2016 to 2021, he served as a guest tutor at the Master Artistic Research department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. In 2024, Arutiunian was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize.
Dear Andrius, in 2022, you represented Armenia at the 59th Venice Art Biennale with your solo show entitled Gharīb. Since then, I have been following your activities online, and last year I attended your performance in Yerevan. Your musical language is tightly connected to modern technologies, yet would it be accurate to say that it seems rooted in ancient sonorities from various cultures?
My musical language roams; in other words, it seeks spaces where the distortion of time, hypnotic structures, and cosmological thinking converge. It is not tied to a singular model of sound-making, even if it is often rooted in what might be called the pan-Caucasian world of sonic traditions. Instead, it is concerned with our ways of knowledge exchange, violent logics of old empires, and those yet to come. So, this musical language migrates, as many do, with the technologies of different decades shaping its manifestation anew, each bringing their own limitations and sonic discoveries.
The first association I have with the word Gharīb is the famous Oriental tale about the wandering ashugh, Ashik Kerib. The atmosphere in your installation on the Venice Pavilion felt distinctly Oriental—quite intriguing and even unusual, if not surreal: a golden, tongue-shaped installation, sounds and music, Armenian carpets, a vinyl player, and, most unexpectedly, a special fruit vodka called Gharīb Oghi. Although there was a booklet with explanatory text, is it meaningful to seek connections between these objects?
Gharīb Pavilion was ethereal, its existence in people’s imaginaries as significant as its brief physical manifestation. Purposefully eluding definition and a defining purpose, the Pavilion sought to exist as a good dream—of an alternate polit-historical composition, where the future simultaneously sends its best wishes to the past, and ancestral knowledge is passed through the deliriums of modernity into the equally contradictory present. This is a decidedly anti-Orientalist approach—it demands a view of the Caucasus and Middle Eastern cosmologies as vibrant, rich, distinct, in their own right.
Together with Gharīb Pavilion’s curator, Anne Davidian, we often reflected on the idea of the vernacular, of the disappeared, of voices that have been silenced yet remained resilient. Gharīb was bound by this shared desire to unearth worlds that never were—a reverse somnio-archeology of sorts, departing far but always returning to its home place.
Esotericism seems to play a prominent role in your art. For the pavilion, you composed a piece called Do Not Fear, Then! for four voices. In an interview, you mentioned using the secret Rushtuni argot, which disappeared in the 19th century. This phenomenon is unfamiliar to most Armenians — how did you come across this idea?
Esotericism intrigues me as a space where the “alternate” can flourish, playfully questioning what lies beyond the realms of provable knowledge. Its dedication to establishing truths, along with the many documented instances of its failures, embodies that tension between a genuine search for enlightenment and a complex form of charlatanism.
The Rushtuni argot, invented by Armenian felt-beaters in the province of Moks, survived to us only through secondary, written, and coded sources. Speculating on how this cryptic jargon, emerging from the murky ancient underworld, might have sounded based on its archeo-acoustic properties became the only way to revive Rushtuni’s strange tongues, even if for a brief moment.
You mentioned charlatanism and I immediately remembered another source of your inspiration: George Gurdjieff. Although this iconic and controversial figure described himself as merely a dance teacher, for nearly nine decades, the world has recognized him as a mystic philosopher. For musicians, he is also a composer, though no one is entirely certain how much of his music he personally wrote. What draws you to this contradictory figure? My understanding of him became clearer after reading the memoirs of poet Avetik Isahakyan’s son (where he quoted Gurdjieff’s confessions to his father), which, ironically, left me even more doubtful about Gurdjieff’s legacy in literature, music, and dance.
Part of Gurdjieff’s allure lies in how he embodies entirely different things to different people — a guru to some, a charlatan to others. But in the end, he was also a representation of a specific world, perhaps lost by now: a syncretic traveler shaped in an era when borders were porous, nations were still forming, and identities were fluid. One of my favorite stories about Gurdjieff is his escape from the Russian Revolution with a small group of followers. In his thick accent, Gurdjieff would later recount how, upon encountering “white” soldiers, he’d tilt his mustache upward, while with “red” soldiers, the master guru would greet them with his mustache pointing down.
Being of Armenian and Lithuanian origin, you live in a third country, the Netherlands. Are you somehow a Gharīb?
While I am certainly not interested in bloodlines, the symbols and language we use to perceive the world are deeply influenced by the places we find each other at. So, my relationship to Armenia is formed by both real and fictitious narratives, which I find equally legitimate. Though I lived in Armenia only until the age of three, those early years must have left an indelible mark. I’m told my first word in Armenian was looys (light), spoken as I pointed to a swinging lamp, set in motion by a minor earthquake. Rotational movements and light — these elements are burnt in my mind as distinctly Armenian and continue to fascinate me to this day…
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