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# While weaving the flowers, I imagined myself standing in the midst of them
- URL: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/while-weaving-the-flowers-i-imagined-myself-standing-in-the-midst-of-them/
- Published: 2026-10-21T09:35:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-21T13:03:23.000Z
- Description: A walk through Anna Boghiguian’s “Weaving Culture” at National Gallery of Armenia.
- Author: Abel Hartooni
- Tags: Review, Art, Diaspora, #main-article

A knot has memory. No matter how hard you try to straighten it, the yarn still keeps its bends and it curves back to the shapes it once held. A carpet holds the memory of the lost garden the way the yarn holds the memory of the knot. After more than fifty years of global itinerancy, Anna Boghiguian’s visual philosophy has been drawn at last into Armenia’s dense web of carpets. The Cairo-born Armenian-Canadian artist first visited Armenia during the mid-1990s and in July 2025 was invited by AHA collective for a month-long residency in the country. That residency became the blueprint for “Weaving Culture” at the National Gallery of Armenia. Boghiguian is known for her site-specific investigations into how peoples, (his)stories, ideas, and materials meet, and how struggles relate. In her cartography of Armenia, entanglements of colonialism, labor, and mythology are found in the materiality of the warp and weft collectively crafted by six women, Anush Abrahamyan, Lena Arakelyan, Alyona Zakharian, Milena Ordiyants, Naira Hovsepyan, and Aida Hambardzumyan, who were forcibly displaced from Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) between 2020 and 2023 after a war, a blockade, and a final military offensive were carried out by Azerbaijan. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/Weaving-Culture_Anna-Boghiguian_Piruza-Khalapyan_AHA-collective.jpg)

Weaving Culture. Anna Boghiguian, Piruza Khalapyan, AHA collective

The exhibition ties the nomadic history of the woven object to the geopolitical vulnerability of the country, and the nation’s long (and continuous) history of exile. It also teases the question of return. According to the political scientist Veronika Zablotsky, diasporic return to Armenia should not be read simply as an ethnic nationalist project, but one that is designed to discipline, educate, and refashion Armenians into liberal subjects, laboring individuals, social entrepreneurs, and human capital. Here, a diasporic artist “returns” to Armenia, a country she was never a resident of. Her fifty years of itinerancy did not end in homecomings so much as it invited Armenia to become errant and fluid. Beyond the social impact – the way the exhibition centers displaced labor, creates new relations of production, and the visibility it brings (eventually) – the exhibition simultaneously unsettles the desire to return to pure origins by positioning the experience of displacement as a central part of the homeland itself.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/Weaving-Culture_Anna-Boghiguian_National-Gallery-of-Armenia_1.jpg)

Weaving Culture. Anna Boghiguian at National Gallery of Armenia

To sustain this argument throughout the exhibition, the floor holds almost no weight. Almost all the woven objects and drawings either hang on the walls or from the ceiling. Across three gallery spaces, the exhibition brings together 37 carpets and tapestries made over a period of nine months between 2025 and 2026, as well as interviews with the weavers, materials from the weaving and dyeing processes, and a video interview with Boghiguian recorded during her residency in Armenia. 

Rather than simply telling the nomadic tale of this ancient craft, Boghiguian and the weavers bring it to life through the invention of “Watercolor Carpets,” as curator Nairi Khachadourian calls them. The geometric designs of the traditional tapestries have been replaced by semi-figurative drawings materialized using more than two hundred distinct dyes. The result is a woven fluid ground that embraces the challenges of constantly shifting shapes, and which eschews easy legibility.

The first gallery offers a prelude to the landscapes of Armenia. Outlined goats climb crimson rocks, a trail of cattle merging with the landscape that surrounds them; multi-coloured mountains rush into each other. The Armenian carpets and tapestries have always carried traces of land and agricultural life. Here the quadrilateral forms of the land are interspersed with open shapes representing indigo skies that merge with the earth. A large carpet shows a kneeling mythic character of a female figure planting a flower beneath dangling suns and stars with her tongue sticking out. Titled *Meghri, the Earth Rises*, this unworldly figure has been suggested in the exhibition text as a protector of the land. Perhaps she embodies a collective consciousness inscribed by a historically fragile territory with a constant need for care and resilience. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/Weaving-Culture---National-Gallery---21-May---Daniil-Primak-38-1.jpg)

Weaving Culture. Anna Boghiguian at National Gallery of Armenia. ©Daniil Primak

Moving on to the second gallery, the scenery shifts into a hanging garden: a flower garden, saplings, snails resting under a tree. On a smaller tapestry, my eyes note a snake coiled around a pomegranate plant, seducing a man to take a bite. Dyeing materials such as roots of madder, imported cochineal, rinds of pomegranate, indigo, walnut bark, and salt sit on a plinth. The colors of the land meet the wounds of exile and tales of return. They are narrated by flying snails and migratory birds. The stork is a repeated motif, a bird which has a special place in the local mythology, cherished for its return after long travels, bringing news of home, hope, and prosperity. 

The central piece here is the large carpet *Listen to the sound of nature, its music is truth,* which is shown back-to-back with its original drawing. A giant ear, another familiar motif from the artist’s *oeuvre*, appears in a vivacious abstract landscape in which a figure is seated underneath a tree. The lines of thought twist around lines of a rural polyphony. “Every nomadic people has had carpets,” I hear coming from the TV screen in the next room, where the artist and the curator talk in a video interview. They discuss the crucial role that the figure of the bard (“Ashugh” in Armenian) plays in transmitting stories through their open-ended and exploratory journeys. The artist longs for times when people would sit and listen to the stories of bards and encounter visions which had previously stayed in the shadows. For Boghiguian, this circular and unbounded exchange of knowledge is disappearing in this waning stage of global democracy. 

This suspended garden relates an exile’s myth-making to the material reality of the state. One might argue that within this interpretation, a certain aestheticization of exile is at play. If exile is so deeply interlaced with the land, does the show risk reading the traumatic experience of displacement as mythic and timeless**,** rather than a plight imposed by actual perpetrators with a continuous colonial agenda?The risk becomes even sharper in relation to Armenia, a nation shaped by repeated historical ruptures caused by many waves of displacement and genocide. This landlocked territory in the South Caucasus is today a meeting point for waves of migration, of both Armenians and non-Armenians, engendered by recent conflicts in the Middle East, as well as repatriates arriving from the diaspora in the West. Perhaps the work aims to highlight the fragility of settled existence itself. Instead of homecoming, the woven objects and the stories about them are inviting Armenia to join its own diaspora(s), where loss is both in the past and, potentially, the future. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/Weaving-Culture_Anna-Boghiguian_Sevak-Thomasians_2.jpg)

Weaving Culture. Anna Boghiguian at National Gallery of Armenia. Photo: Sevak Thomasians

The third room traces the experience of uprootedness towards transcendence. This elevated spiritual aspect of the practice of weaving is attested by one of the weavers who says: “The higher the weft rises, the more I free myself from my fears.” The tapestries depict angels in conversation, three alchemist figures with hands on their eyes – perhaps seeing the world with their inner light – and metamorphoses of birds becoming angels, and vice versa. The only work on the ground shows a series of trees in a valley of imaginative colors. *Trees have memory* testifies to how memory itself becomes the shaky ground of displaced thought. 

*“*While weaving the flowers, I imagined myself standing in the midst of them. I love nature very much. Our house in Artsakh was in the lap of nature. From the window, I could see fir trees and flowers. Now, I am weaving those same flowers. With every knot made, there is a great sense of devotion; you devote yourself to the carpet.”So says Naira Hovsepyan in one of the testimonies present in the space. This passage reminded me of the cultural theorist Esther Peeren’s observation of how displacement unsettles the particular constructions of time-space through which a community understands its surroundings and positions itself in them. Here, the homeland is not only distant, but it is also past (or passed). By leaving behind the home in space and in time, the meditative process of weaving grows into an active practice of re-membering. It whispers that perhaps what is lost is not only the place but also the haunted present moment. 

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/10/Weaving-Culture---National-Gallery---21-May---Daniil-Primak-03_resized.jpg)

Weaving Culture. Anna Boghiguian at National Gallery of Armenia. ©Daniil Primak 

The logic of return as development asserts straight lines: arrivals, investments, and linear projections. In “Weaving Culture”, the knot offers a different logic: one of torsion and vitality tied by hands of women whose homes were taken, and an accompanying logic of stories which hold together what remains. Weaving joins the terrestrial to the extraterrestrial, the colors of the land and the wounds of exile, the homeland to its diaspora(s).  
  
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