Published in 2008 and continuing through 2020, Queering Yerevan is a website featuring the work of “a collective of artists, writers, cultural critics and activists queering and using Yerevan as an experimental space.”
While the website is primarily in Armenian, many pieces are written in English and French. It features essays, poetry, reviews, and (perhaps most importantly) a record of the Queering Yerevan Collective’s actions, protests, exhibits, and marches.
The collective published Queered: What’s To Be Done With XCentric Art in 2011.
From the very beginning, the task of the collective has been to disturb habitual perception by rendering the familiar in unfamiliar terms in order to slow down automated perception. A QY act, in other words, is a form of slant activism, which differs from conventional acts of intervention that use direct or straightforward language to get across a certain message, or elicit a specific response.
The above video is one example of the QY collective’s interventions. This was staged in front of Armenia’s National Security (ex-KGB) building.
Other interventions include “Togh lini pat(k)erazm” (Let there be im(war)ge), by Arpi Adamyan, lusine talalyan, and Shushan Avagyan.
They held a scripted and improvisational performance at the fountain of Yerevan’s Republic Square (in front of the National Gallery of Armenia). The QY Collective always chooses sites of special significance. The fountain had been a base for Communist Party leaders to address the Soviet Armenia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it became a primary site of protests against the government.
You can read more about that specific intervention here.
In 2014, the QY collection published մեջ և միջև (In and Between)
It is a “catalog of art interventions committed by Queering Yerevan Collective between 2013-14 within the scope of the project titled ‘In and Between the (Re)public‘ as well as other texts that have informed and motivated these new works.”
