Soviet-era building in armenia hosts site-specific art program
The abandoned, Soviet-era Palace of Culture in the spa town of Jermuk, Armenia, hosts Architecture: Ghostly Past and Unrevealed Present, a site-specific art program by ToC Cultural Organization that explores architectural abandonment as a form of ongoing presence.
Over the course of a one-week residency in April 2025, three Armenian artists, photographer Armen Ter-Mkrtchyan, sculptor Manvel Matevosyan, and printmaker Sophie Musoyan, inhabited the building, creating works directly within its walls using salvaged materials, dust, light, and shadow. Their interventions embraced its fragments, its chipped tiles, rusted frames, and weathered textures as tools for storytelling, questioning what stories the building would tell if it could speak again.
Ter-Mkrtchyan’s photographs explore the passage of time by using shadows and light reflections. Musoyan uses the cyanotype process to create images that record textures and faint shapes on paper. Matevosyan builds sculptures from materials found inside the palace, creating a physical connection between the artwork and the building’s current state. The exhibition After Silence, held at the nearby Jermuk Gallery, featured the artists’ works.
all images courtesy of ToC Cultural Organization
short documentary traces Ghostly Past and Unrevealed Present
Architecture: Ghostly Past and Unrevealed Present stands apart from typical reuse or heritage projects because it’s based on the idea that a building is still empty until someone enters it, moves through it, or speaks inside it. Armen Ter-Mkrtchyan, Manvel Matevosyan, and Sophie Musoyan worked with this idea when they entered the Palace of Culture, allowing the building’s materials, surfaces, and feeling to guide their work.
The project by ToC Cultural Organization also includes a short documentary by filmmaker Marat Sargsyan, which shows how the artists worked with the space. It was selected by the LINA European Architecture Platform and shown at the 2024 LINA Architecture Conference in Sarajevo. Through this, Ghostly Past and Unrevealed Present brings attention to Jermuk’s forgotten modernist buildings and connects them to wider conversations in Europe about decay, reuse, and the value of places that are often overlooked.
the abandoned, Soviet-era Palace of Culture in the spa town of Jermuk, Armenia
three Armenian artists inhabited the building in April 2025
Armen Ter-Mkrtchyan, Manvel Matevosyan, and Sophie Musoyan created works directly within its walls
using salvaged materials, dust, light, and shadow