Untitled (Gurgen Mahari, The world is alive, Venice)

And the world is alive. And Van is alive.

The artist quotes Gurgen Mahari’s novel Burning Orchards, which was published in 1966 and publically condemned in Yerevan. In his novel Mahari portrays the town of his youth, Van, from approximately 1908 until May 1915. Mahari, who was arrested by the Soviet police and stayed in Siberia from 1937 to 1947, makes Van come alive through the dialogical form of his novel resurrecting not the historical Van, but those people and things “outside of history.”