News
Silvina Der Meguerditchian
A Wishful Gaze – Toward The Future
Curated by Nathalie Hoyos and Rainald Schumacher
Supported by IFA – Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations
17 July – 14 August 2026
After more than twenty years, Silvina Der Meguerditchian presents her first solo exhibition in Armenia, A Wistful Gaze – Toward the Future. At the NPAK, the exhibition brings together works that interweave personal memories with collective narratives and explore questions of belonging, loss and tradition.
The video work Care to Care (2024) depicts a quiet, almost ritualistic gesture: the combing of hair. It is an act that evokes trust and closeness, whilst simultaneously pointing to cultural practices of togetherness. Between intimacy and performance, hair becomes a vessel for memory, belonging and personal history. In Frou Flou (2023/2025), hair is braided into sculptural forms – luminous, synthetic, individual. They bear female names and tell stories that defy the norm.
From the five-part video series Qanun Archives, the works Buenos Aires/Berlin (2025) and Armenia (2025) will be shown: the qanun, deeply rooted in the Armenian musical heritage, connects places and people across vast geographical and cultural spaces: from Cilicia via Cairo and Paris to Buenos Aires and Berlin. The work traces its history as well as the people who build, play and preserve it.
The installation The Silence of Stones (2022/2023) is being restaged at the NPAK. Here, two disparate materials come together to form a quiet reflection on loss and the deliberate erasure of cultural heritage.
Silvina Der Meguerditchians’ work is closely linked to her own biography: born in Buenos Aires as the granddaughter of Armenian grandparents, she moved to West Berlin in the late 1980s. Her work does not provide answers, but opens up spaces for questions about origin, identity and what shapes us. In 2015, she was part of the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, which was awarded the Golden Lion.
A Wistful Gaze—Towards the Future
It’s hard to put Der-Meguerditchian into a restrictive framework. Her work is never purely one thing as each of her pieces dramatically defies medium-specificity to achieve a kind of restless porousness and vitality that defines the artist’s boisterous personality itself. However, the foundations of her trans-disciplinary methodology are firmly set on rigorous archival research and exploration. Moving through the endless detritus of history in the form of vernacular photographs, textiles, industrial waste, maps and letters, Der-Meguerditchian stitches these sometimes incongruous fragments into new narratives about survival, remembering and empathy. Regardless of their forms, the uniting imperative behind these works is emphatic: to transmit cultural knowledge beyond traumatic ruptures and enliven it as a positive source of continuity.
Presenting some of her most recent videos and sculptural installations, the exhibition at ACCEA (NPAK) brings this trajectory to a markedly more romantic, sensual and even nostalgic pitch, which achieves the difficult feat of powerful emotional resonance without falling into the quagmire of self-pitying sentimentality.
