Andrius Arutiunian

∗1991, Armenia/Lithuania

Andrius Arutiunian (1991, Vilnius, Lithuania) is an Armenian-Lithuanian artist and composer based in the Netherlands. His practice moves across installation, film, sound, and sculpture, treating these as different registers of a single inquiry.

Arutiunian's work engages alternate models of world-ordering rooted in vernacular cosmologies and speculative mythologies. Drawing on non-Western knowledge systems, he traces how myth and power have always been inseparable – and how histories of oppression resurface through contemporary culture. His installations treat sound as a fluid architecture of time, acoustic and political at once. Vernacularity, geopolitical narrative, and histories of extractivism echo through this research, where the underground – at once physical space and political condition – becomes a site of counter-narration.

For Biennale Gherdëina 10, Arutiunian presents a newly commissioned installation and video work drawing on extractivism, mountain mythologies, and speculative future deities. Conceived as a "banquet of rocks," the works unfold as a gathering of non-human entities within the dimly lit wooden theatre hall of the village museum.

The Black Banquet acts as a welcoming space for spirits: a table adorned with iconography of the worlds below. The work operates through two forms of extraction: bitumen, a remnant of deep time, engulfs the sculpture, while motifs cast across coins, funerary vessels, and tomb walls were fed into a custom algorithm to produce a new iconography—speculative deities of a world to come, assembled from underworld cosmologies. At once syncretic and synthetic, the work becomes a gathering space for the invisible.

Alongside the sculpture, the video work Lethe draws the visitor deeper into the installation's speculative logic. The work follows a slow traversal through a smoke-filled club – a site of chthonic gathering where trance, collective ritual, and the aesthetics of the underground converge. As the camera moves through the haze, near-imperceptible figures begin to emerge within the smoke: hallucinatory deities generated through the same synthetic process that shaped the sculpture's iconography. A four-channel sound work envelops the space: a trance track slowed to a seventh of its original tempo track, stripped of its high frequencies and pitched toward the subterranean.

Has taken part in:

• Biennale Gherdëina 10 | (Future) Paradise Gardens