Chapter Three
Chapter Three (February 2026–April 2027) unfolds across three solo exhibitions and one group exhibition, alongside related public programming and a publication. The chapter launches with Roksana Pirouzmand’s solo exhibition everything was once something else (the land was the sea, the sea was the land) (February 21–May 2, 2026), presented across JOAN and OXY ARTS, and unfolds through an extended engagement with the work of Soviet film director of Armenian origin Sergei Parajanov. Rather than functioning as a singular point of origin, Parajanov’s practice operates as a generative force moving through the chapter—reappearing, receding, and resurfacing across exhibitions, programs, and research threads. A countercultural figure working within the twentieth-century USSR, Parajanov is widely regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. His legacy provides a critical lens through which the chapter considers how artists navigate beauty and violence, sensation and suffering, under conditions of political constraint.
The research centers on Parajanov’s revolutionary film The Color of Pomegranates (1969), a meditation on the life of the eighteenth-century Georgian poet and musician Sayat Nova. Rejecting linear narrative, the film presents Armenian imagery, ritual, and symbolism through a sequence of surreal, meticulously composed tableaux vivants. Deeply engaged with folklore and culture, alongside religion, spirituality, and questions of freedom, Parajanov’s work insists on the coexistence of beauty and mourning. It articulates a condition in which aesthetic pleasure and historical violence are inseparable—where life is lived on a knife’s edge under the weight of state power. His singular cinematic language stood in direct opposition to the tenets of socialist realism, and he was ultimately imprisoned both for the perceived subversiveness of his work and for his sexuality.
Rather than serving as an introduction or historical framing device, an exhibition of Parajanov’s film works and selected archival materials appears within the chapter as a site of intensification. Positioned in relation to the surrounding exhibitions and programs, this presentation operates as a pressure point: a moment where historical material and contemporary practice press against one another, producing impressions, echoes, and dissonances across time. The Parajanov material does not resolve the chapter’s questions but instead complicates them, inviting ongoing return and re-reading.
In parallel, Chapter Three presents multidisciplinary solo and group exhibitions by contemporary artists, filmmakers, poets, and musicians whose practices resonate with Parajanov’s approach—whether through shared conceptual concerns, thematic affinities, or formal strategies. Across these works, abstraction, metaphor, and embodied sensation are mobilized to register politicized experiences and lived tribulations without relying on direct representation. Together, they challenge dominant assumptions about what a political image must look like, proposing instead indirect, poetic, and affective forms that unfold meaning through duration, proximity, and repeated encounter.