January 4 and 5
13:00 Andrius Arutiunian / Armen / Car ride starting in the Sculpture Yard / Registration required / 42 min. / Repeated every hour on the hour, last ride 17:00
Drawing from a personal collection of cassettes, vinyl, and VHS tapes of diasporic Armenian pop and disco from the 1970s to the 1990s, Andrius Arutiunian, himself Armenian-Lithuanian, remixes and reimagines the personal and cultural memory embedded in this music. While Armen also exists as a record and a live music performance, this Vilnius iteration taps into Arutiunian’s childhood memories of Armenia, where the sounds of blaring music from the speakers of ageing Mercedes-Benz taxis greeted arrivals at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan. Published on an audio cassette, Armen is experienced through a taxi’s sound system, with the journey’s duration mirroring the combined lengths of the cassette’s A and B sides. The route, mapped out by Arutiunian, evokes a passage between two intertwined cities and homes, encapsulating the shared histories they embody.