Still from the film "postDIY". Camera viewfinder view. Black and white image of a panel house wall with rows of different balconies. Two circles of the camera viewfinder distort the image.

postDIY

18+
Directors: lucine talalyan, Shushan Avagyan
Armenia, 2014, 8 minutes, experimental
The film is available online, for free, during the period of September 23 - October 7. It is screened in the original language with Ukrainian subtitles (SDH). English subtitles are available for this film.

postDIY is directed at the circumstances of the bombing of DIY and worldwide ignorance that is often expressed through homophobia. It aims to produce both visual and verbal language that constructs and narrates life after the tragic event that took place on May 8, 2012. If the attack on DIY can be read as an act to silence and establish exclusionary societal norms by eradicating what is perceived as transgressive, then this video documents the fact that life goes on no matter what. It questions the desire to establish uniformity and totalitarianism in the post-independent phase of the Armenian Republic and seeks out the beauty in a dissident relationship between two women.

One of the goals of postDIY is to introduce the viewers to the bomb attack in a non-narrative and non-journalistic style, in a manner that is both intimate and subjective. The film estranges viewers from the banal act of terrorism and compels them to experience the boredom caused by the familiar (typical Soviet panel block apartment buildings) and the shock caused by the strange (act of intimacy). Another goal of the film is to return humanness to women’s bodies that are often defiled and commodified by the consumerist culture. The viewer is exposed to an inappropriate “excess” of immobility (of the buildings) and movement (of the bodies) that exceeds the norms of the conventional consumerist gaze.

Film screening dates: 23.09.2021 — 7.10.2021
Photo of the director of the film "postDIY"
Director
lucine talalyan is a visual artist born in Armenia in 1975 and one of the founding members of the Queering Yerevan Collective. She received her BA in painting from Terlemezyan Yerevan State College of Fine Arts in 1998 and her MA in set design from Yerevan State Institute of Theater and Cinema in 2003.

Amongst other places, she has done residencies and participated in shows in Georgia, France, Sweden, Germany, and Austria. Her work – in video art such Pieces, photograph series such as Be Careful…Before Entering, soautor and visual design for books such as Queered: What’s to be Done with Centric Art? - explores themes such as history and memory, visibility and invisibility, and the cracks ad fissures between the social and the personal.
Photo of the director of the film "postDIY"
Director
Shushan Avagyan (b. 1976) is a writer and lecturer in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University of Armenia. She received her MA and PhD from Illinois State University. Her articles and translations have appeared in Contemporary Women's Writing, The Book of Saint Ejneb, Asymptote, and Dissidences: Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. She is the author of the novels Girk-Anvernagir (A Book, Untitled 2006) and Zarubyani Kanayq (Zarubyan’s Women 2013).