Workshop with founders and directors of renowned international galleries including Sundaram Tagore, an art historian, gallerist, and award-winning filmmaker; Chang Tsong-Zung, curator, art director of Hanart T Z Gallery and initiator of the “West Heavens” series of Indian-Chinese exchanges; Janet Rady, specialist in contemporary art, founder of Janet Redy Fine Art gallery in London and Dubai. The topics and questions of the program were: How important is the secondary market to the gallery business and what is the potential for art market growth in the Caucasus? What has driven the growth of the contemporary art market with modern and postwar art the most lucrative sector?; Is the market in the MENA overly dependent on the Gulf and is there likely to be geographical regional expansion?

The panel was led by Nazareth Karoyan, art critic, curator, and director of the ICA, lead this panel discussion. The panel discussion participants are: Vahram Akimyan – digital culture researcher and founder of Panopticon media platform panopticon.am, Teresa Davtyan – curator and founder of online digital art gallery dddkunskhouse.com, Marine Khachatryan – art critic and columnist at Critical Review criticalreview.am.

Topics included : How do the traditional market subjects – the artist, gallerist, curator, auction house, art fair – react to the appearance of blockchains and the presence of cryptocurrencies?- How do Armenian contemporary art and artists respond to these changes? – While not being represented in the international art market, are they considering these new open exchange platforms as opportunities to get involved?

A lecture and presentation by  Dr. Iain Robertson,  Head of Art Business Studies at Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London about  the emergence of new art and art markets in Iran, India, China, South America, and Southeast Asia,  the ideological and cultural shift away from a global Western cultural consensus toward a multitude of new approaches. The shift which has resulted in exceedingly high prices being paid by collectors in national markets for art that is very different from global art, and how it will have a significant impact on the future value of all art.

Social, political and cultural artistic perspectives vs. powerful cultural institutions
Featuring visiting curator and writer Georg Schoelhammer, Susanna Gyulamiryan, curator, art critic and director of the Art and Cultural Studies Laboratory (ACSL) and the director of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Nazareth Karoyan. Moderator – Dr. Randall Rhodes, proctor at the American University of Armenia.

art collective lecture – performance Transliterative tease (In partnership with of the Goethe-Institute)
The Tranny Tease explores the potential for transliteration–the conversion of scripts–as a strategy equally parsed between resistance and research into notions such as identity politics, colonialism, and faith.
The march of alphabets has always accompanied that of empires – Arabic with the rise of Islam, Latin with that of Roman Caholicism, and Cyrillic with the Orthodox Church and subsequently communism. This lecture-performance attempts not to emancipate peoples or nations but rather the sounds rolling off our tongues