The rival influences of Europe and Russia are everywhere and in plain sight in Yerevan. “Europe stands with Armenia. Together we are stronger,” reads a four-storey placard, adorned in EU colours, on Teryan Street. Just a few steps away, on the square opposite the opera building, the Mariinsky and Bolshoi Theatres are setting up for another free open-air concert – a deft exercise in soft power. Tellingly, these June concerts draw big crowds, who delight in the sounds of Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky.
Armenia’s relationship with Europe and Russia is less a spectrum and more a shifting mosaic—a consequence of life at a geopolitical, economic and religious crossroads. Unlike in neighbouring Tbilisi, visitors will not find anti-Russian and pro-EU graffiti on street corners; Russian remains widely spoken here; and Armenia’s economy and energy sector remain heavily dependent on Moscow. Nonetheless, in March 2025, the parliament passed a bill that prioritises EU integration: a move that detractors have called purely artificial and impractical.
This dual tendency, to put it simply, towards both East and West shapes not only Armenia’s economy and politics but its contemporary arts and culture, too. “We get our resources and cheap materials from Russia and Turkey, culturally we are more Middle Eastern, yet we look to Europe and always think of ourselves as one of the old European civilizations,” says the architect Marianna Karapetyan, who curated this year’s Armenian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. (Together with the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, Karapetyan’s Yerevan-based studio, electric architects, used AI to create imagined Armenian religious architecture based on digital scans of real, endangered monuments.)
Karapetyan studied in London and launched her practice in Moscow before moving back to Armenia in 2017. Since then, her studio has designed restaurants and wineries, educational centres and housing complexes. One current project aims at transforming a former industrial site in the south of Yerevan into a self-sustaining, “15-minute” neighbourhood. Whilst Karapetyan finds working in Armenia advantageous – it’s easy to network, projects move quickly, and there’s more room for a small studio to experiment and win big projects – she recognises that it still lags behind Europe in terms of innovation, sustainability and quality. The answer, however, is not simply introducing European ideas wholesale but reinterpreting them for Armenia’s needs and possibilities. “We bring back from Europe the sense of aesthetic, the visual trends, and we use them at a scale that is possible.” As such, it is not about replicating the Bosco Verticale or King’s Cross but applying a certain philosophy: using sustainable local materials, repurposing the old, designing with the wider community in mind.
For the photographer and museum director Vahan Stepanyan, this philosophy means a certain way of engaging with and presenting art. Stepanyan, a former senior photographer at the Cannes Film Festival, has shot an array of household names: Charles Aznavour, Gael García Bernal, Wim Wenders, to name a few. He’s also the founder of Rambalkoshe – a small contemporary art museum on the outskirts of Yerevan. It’s an experimental, international, and collaborative space that most recently hosted a performance and lecture by the German artist-composer Robert Lippok. Rambalkoshe was born in part out of a frustration with the bureaucracy and sluggishness of Armenia’s museum culture. “95% of museums here are governmental or somehow connected to the government. They’re too closed-off and archaic for me. What I love about museums in Europe is that they’re always evolving and working with new artists. It’s really exciting.”
Broadly speaking, Stepanyan advocates for a more open-minded and decentralised approach to art. He names Antwerp’s Museum aan de Stroom and the Vitra Foundation in Basel as particular inspirations. “You look at an institution, museum or cultural centre in Europe, and you think, ‘This is excellent. This is something that I want to learn from and bring to Armenia.’” He also recalls an episode that took place some 20 years ago, at the Centre Pompidou, that, for him, is emblematic of European aesthetic values. A group of schoolchildren were sitting in front of a painting by Piet Mondrian. “Not the easiest piece of art, let’s say.” Although Stepanyan does not speak French, he realised that each child was then asked to articulate their own subjective response to the painting, rather than simply having the painting explained to them.
Some artists are more sceptical of Europe’s cultural influence, which they worry is a one-way street leading to Eurocentrism and national estrangement. The writer and filmmaker Anahit Ghazaryan laments that Armenia’s lionisation of European ideas comes at the cost of its own. “I love Europe, I love its culture, its philosophers and thinkers, but, at the same time, we’re no longer connected to our own knowledge,” she says over a drink at Varpet, an artist’s studio-turned-café in the centre of Yerevan. Conversely, she finds that Europe is largely interested in Armenia as a cultural commodity – a land of tragedy and kebabs. “I always feel Europe wants us to self-exoticise. We discuss this a lot with my Georgian and Azerbaijani friends, that Europe wants us to translate ourselves in a way it prefers to understand.”
Ghazaryan has recently returned from Berlin, where her play Planned Outage enjoyed a run at the Maxim Gorki Theater (its title nods to the energy crisis that gripped Armenia in the post-Soviet years). Her work often deals with subjects that are at best sensitive, at worst taboo, in Armenia—dating, homosexuality, women’s experiences in a patriarchal society, relations with neighbouring Azerbaijan. As a consequence, she is routinely criticised by the more conservative and nationalist segment of society. These are not, she admits, the narratives of war and horror that cater to European expectations and draw the attention of juries. Nor does she have an interest in producing such narratives. Her primary concern is creating art that has deals with Armenian society in all its complexity and engages Armenian audiences, even if she’s not always understood. “I want to create for my people first and then think about Europe. But sometimes it’s very hard to create for your own people. You have to be able to wait. Maybe I’m creating for the next generation.”
