NEWS

Argišt Alaverdyan in Infinite Universes: Weary Knights, Shiny Altars & Heavy Gods DLC at the Czech Centre Paris

Video-game influences and aesthetics are a natural part of the work of generations whose lives are inseparably bound up with digital culture. It often seems as if fantastic fragments and motifs become an aesthetic shorthand capable of evoking warm nostalgia on the one hand and a sense of mythical supernaturalness on the other. A bit of magic within a supposedly rational social system in which myths have seemingly disappeared. This exhibition emerges from that tension, yet at the same time deliberately transcends it. For art inspired by video games is most powerful when it avoids mere illustrativeness. Elsewhere, the focus turns to the forces that act upon us within virtual realities. The digital vocabulary of Argišt Alaverdyan balances on the edge of painterly abstraction. Obvious resemblance (for instance to genre properties) gives way in favor of fundamental elements. Simple backgrounds recalling the basic canvases of 3D modeling programs or game engines are overlaid with fragmented shards of bodies—from limbs to digital chakras, some kind of force fields, to an (elven?) face emerging from a cube. He may well be suggesting that the boundary between the virtual and the real is permeable. It is a play of forms and identities, hinting at the ways in which the computer influences us while we play—and how we, in turn, influence it. Simply rendered graphic elements seem to represent a layer that manipulates all of this, a medium through which an invisible force turns the game camera. Whether it is an exploration of the nature of nostalgia or of fantasy motifs with their myth-making power, the breaking down of game scenes into their elementary particles, or the construction of altars inspired by digital perspectives, the works in this exhibition are traces of a reality that, outside the windows of the Czech House, itself increasingly resembles a video game. The ball of Ariadne’s thread begins to unwind. The quest begins. Loading… Ondřej Trhoň (extract)

Image: Argišt Alaverdyan, Entity 13, 2021. Courtesy the artist.

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NEWS

Argišt Alaverdyan, Flowing Positions, National Library of Technology Gallery, Prague

Although the artist chooses the medium of the classical painting for his expression, the themes of his canvases engage with highly topical issues related to technological development and its impact on human society and imagination. Alaverdyan depicts robots, digital representations and avatars, various non-human beings, and virtual as well as physical entities with hybrid bodily forms, thus operating within the realm of contemporary transhumanist and posthumanist speculation. His detached images—constructed with surprising rationality both formally and conceptually—can be icily beautiful, yet at the same time ominous. A question hangs in the air: will the technological era we are now entering be a utopia or a dystopia?
Milan Mikuláštík

NTK Gallery, Prague, Oct 28, 2025 – Feb 28, 2026

Image: Argišt Alaverdyan, Flowing Positions 8, 2024, 170 x 170 cm

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PUBLICATIONS

Richard Nikl in conversation with Marek Meduna. Potyčka na území nikoho, Center for Contemporary Arts Prague.

Once upon a time, in an exhausted era in which nothing could apparently happen. Every exhibition is a small battle in the heat of the culture war. Individual skirmishes both consolidate and undermine constellations of opinions. Their rhythm and harmony is the heartbeat of a warring community. The culture war is both portend and sublimation. It is easy to escape its roar. Opinions can be circumvented. The edges are rounded for user comfort. Excesses seep into online news bulletins, where they are quickly digested by the machinery of individualised feeds. Shapes are blurred, masses and colours are re-interpreted. The gaze penetrates even where it is not invited. Individually invented expressions (řasokoule, zooludie, ableism, mallogic, post-irony, wokerarti, herderizza) with indistinct meanings may be a symptom of our prolonged immaturity, dangerous exuberance or cultural schizophrenia.

In the polyrhythm of rhymes and consonants, more than one cultural heritage with its tendency to moralise has been dumped, like a lump at the foot of the simply boiled flavours of sauces and the thick stock of soups. Several warnings hang on the fence of the wild apple trees. Their compliance warns that the murky rivers of culture move towards dissolving in the sensation of an ocean. The brackish water slowly evaporates, leaving the cargo collected on its way down the continent and like a raincloud heads for revival in a clear mountain spring. It is not for nothing that the word Mohan (Main) is derived from the Indo-European mei or water and the word Alps from the Latin albus (white) or altus (high). The hedonistic response of contemporary art is articulated both in cycles and fractures. Marek Meduna (extract)

Potyčka na území nikoho, eds. Marek Meduna, Zuzana Blochová, published by Center for Contemporary Arts Prague, 2024

Image: Richard Nikl, Garden, 2024, 180 x 90 cm. Courtesy the artist.

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