normal studio In Relief, Design in Armenia, 2025 info close

In Relief, Design in Armenia

Exhibition organised by the Cité du design
as part of the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Étienne 2025
22 May to 21 September 2025

The In Relief exhibition offers an immersion in the geography of contemporary Armenian creation. It explores the intimate relationship between artists and their environment and seeks to show how territory is a resource that nourishes practices and imaginations.
The exhibition unfolds the mountainous cartography of Armenia, allowing a reading of the territory revealed through the creations of more than fifteen Armenian artists - all of them driven and inhabited by an energy, elegance and freedom that shape this country where it is pleasant to live.
The exhibition highlights the work of a number of artists, designers and architects who have taken over rural and urban spaces to rethink bus shelters, roofs and benches.
Inspired by Armenia’s modernist architecture, intervening directly in the rural landscape with the participation of local residents, or reflecting on exterior and interior spaces, Armenian contemporary design practice is all about sharing.
The social aspect is illustrated in the collective creation of a contemporary “red carpet” designed for the 21st Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival. Like a woven territory - that of Artsakh - seen from the sky, this monumental and unique creation unites an artist and a curator with women weavers and professionals from the world of cinema. Here, the art of weaving - an ancestral Armenian craft long relegated to the traditional repertoire - comes under the spotlight, as it takes on an innovative new lease of life, a design that weaves relationships.
These woven relationships are expressed in a profound dialogue with the country’s millennia-old heritage, shaped in the territory, rooting each project in a collective history that transcends generations and current geopolitical borders. The Armenian architectural heritage is an inexhaustible resource for designers, who appropriate its lines, materials and shapes to transpose them with remarkable discretion into textile design, or to oreserve and transmit its history through digital archiving - echoing the realities of the war and destruction Armenia is facing today. Designers are thus proposing a new visual order in our world of conflict. Armenian design listens attentively to its territory.
Beyond the responsible approaches and circular economy practices shared by the contemporary designers exhibited, the question of sustainability and the future also manifests itself through graphic design and typography. Armenian identity rests above all on the language, the oral but especially the written language. Designers and typographers are constantly playing with the unique Armenian alphabet created in the 5th century to propose new relationships to the written word, new visual identities, new worlds and imaginary realms. Armenian design is constantly inventing and reinventing itself.
And it is indeed inventiveness that is the designer’s resource in Armenian society. The exhibition pays tribute to two leading figures of the modernist era, whose ingenuity has influenced many contemporary designers. Multifaceted artists Hripsime Simonyan (Kars,
1916 - Yerevan, 1998) and Kamo Nigaryan (Helendorf, 1950 - Yerevan, 2011) made a major contribution to the development of industrial design and the applied and decorative arts in Armenia during the Soviet era. The works and archives exhibited offer a visual and historical counterpoint to the contemporary creations of Armenia’s youth. Armenian design emerges from the archives. The past is present to foreshadow the future.

CURATORS
Nairi Khatchadourian, Jean-François Dingjian et Eloi Chafaï

EXHIBITION DESIGN
Normal Studio

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Sargis Antonian