Andrius
Arutiunian

At once hypnotic, otherworldly, and playful, Andrius Arutiunian’s work engages the most elusive of materials—sound—to raise questions about the entanglements of our audible and political worlds; their ordering through processes of tuning; and the role of music, sound, and listening in revealing and altering otherwise hidden realms.

Arutiunian’s alchemical practice—which has variously taken shape as sculpture, installation, film, composition, performance, and text—came to international attention during the 59^th Venice Biennale in 2022, when the Armenian Lithuanian artist was selected to represent the Republic of Armenia. His acclaimed solo exhibition, Gharīb, an expansive meditation on ideas of strangeness, evoked the enigmatic figure of G. I. Gurdjieff, an Armenian Greek mystic, composer, spiritual leader, and possible charlatan. Among its offerings were three sound installations, two artist books, a vinyl record, ritualistic gatherings, and a custom “oghi”, a type of moonshine popular in Armenia that spoke to the pavilion’s themes of altered states, inebriation “both toxic and divine,” and travelling through in-between states.

Included in Gharīb were three remarkable sound installations: Do Not Fear, Then!, a work for four voices rooted in a secret language, Ruštuni, sourced from Armenian incantations recorded in the 19th century in the city of Moks; You Do Not Remember Yourself, a six-meter-long hanging, curved brass sculpture outfitted with surface transducers that vibrate the instrument, enabling it to transmit resonances of electronically modified voices; and Seven Common Ways of Disappearing, a score and installation featuring a retuned grand piano that responded to Gurdjieff’s proposals for non-Western modes of “tuning and world-ordering.” This latter work has since been released as an album on Hallow Ground and described by one critic as “mind-bending and ornately intriguing… confounding music that’s struck through with magic.” (boomkat)

Arutiunian’s wide-ranging work has dealt with such themes as the politics of AI and algorithms (Synthetic Exercises and The Irresistible Powers of Silent Talking); oil and voice extraction (Kayīb); forgery and disappearance (A Gift That Keeps On Giving); sonic dissent; and musical migrations (Arizona Club). It has been exhibited at such leading venues as Le Fresnoy and Centre Pompidou (Tourcoing), CTM Festival (Berlin), M HKA (Antwerp), documenta 14 (Kassel), FACT (Liverpool), and Rewire Festival (The Hague); and supported by residencies including Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt) and Cité internationale des arts (Paris).

Arutiunian writes, “Should we (me and you) make this world disappear? This is not a call for revolution, but rather an invitation for a dance.” We would be wise to take him up on this generous invitation, which, in keeping with his singular practice, tunes in to other worlds and invites us to do the same.

Text: Gascia Ouzounian