YOUNG ARMENIAN ARTIST EXHIBITS COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT OF INTERCULTURAL EXPERIENCE THIS WEEKEND WITH NEW SHOW “WEIGHTLESS” IN PETRALONA

On Saturday, November 22nd at Alkinois arts space in Ano Petralona, a young artist called Elen Demirian, from the Armenian capital of Yerevan, will open an exhibition of portraits and still life paintings that together depict a collective image of various personae coming from elsewhere who are currently living in a state of cultural transition in Athens. The artist herself is among this group, and a self-portrait is included in the show, worked onto an old pillow case which she brought with her from home, in a piece titled after Proust’s Madeleine. Besides this work, the installation features mid-sized portraits and miniature still lifes, in addition to an XL centrepiece that depicts six faces together on a giant suspended sheet.

Under the title Weightless, the artist will exhibit paintings at Alkinois that portray individuals from diverse countries who have passed through multiple versions of adaptation, hybridity and change. As she sits with her subjects, Demirian draws out elements of each sitter’s
character and journey through their conversation, and then seeks to communicate these aspects through her choice of details and colours. Her sitters’ experiences of transition and personal stories are represented together in this exhibition as a collective portrait of cross cultural identities - and of lives in constant flux, as the show name Weightless reflects.

The exhibition is presented by Dila, an informal network that organises mentorship support for young refugee women, mainly in Athens but also reaching to other cities across Europe including Brussels and Berlin. Dila has been supporting the young artist for the past year, both through close creative consultancy and personal encouragement, and by providing her with a studio space in the shared art studios called Work in Progress, located in Exarchia, which runs as a non-profit organisation supporting artists of all kinds. Demirian is living in Athens to achieve her Visual Arts degree at Deree College, where she is part of the refugee scholarship program Education Unites.

Twenty-five-year-old Demirian says she has always known she would be an artist since she was young and has been working as a freelance illustrator since the age of fourteen. Across abstract and figurative paintings, besides her newer experiments touching on sculpture and performance, her recurrent themes include spiritual visions, political tensions, cultural histories, and human expression. She has previously exhibited in Venice, Italy, and La Roche-sur-Yon, France, besides taking part in group shows in her home town of Yerevan. For this portrait series her style merges her illustrative experience in graphic design work with the softer aesthetic that dominates her painting practice, generating a graphic style she says came naturally to her when faced with how best to feel into the expressions and individualities she found before her when she started working on the Weightless sequence.