Opening on the 11th of September at Sabrina Amrani Gallery, the exhibition Go East, Young Man traces the life and work of Chant Avedissian (1951–2018) through the artist’s own words. Structured around a handwritten autobiography completed shortly before his death, the exhibition unfolds as both a timeline and a statement, revealing what Avedissian chose to preserve and what he chose to leave unsaid.
At its core, the exhibition is a retrospective that follows the evolution of Avedissian’s practice across five decades. From his early photographic work in the 1970s and his explorations with textiles in the 1980s and 1990s, to his internationally recognised Icons of the Nile series, the exhibition illuminates a restless search for identity. Caught between his Armenian heritage, Egyptian nationality, and studies abroad in Canada and France, Avedissian confronted the cultural erasures of Egypt’s Nasserist era by turning to ancient motifs and traditional craftsmanship. His close collaboration with architect Hassan Fathy further nurtured this approach, grounding his practice in local materials and age-old techniques as a way of reclaiming primary identity beyond borders.
In this conversation, curator Jal Hamad reflects on the process of shaping an exhibition rooted in the artist’s own testimony and considers how Avedissian’s legacy can be honoured today.
How do you navigate questions of conservation, presentation, and authorship when working with such a multifaceted body of work such as Chant Avedissian’s estate?
We are very lucky that all the works come directly from the artist studio through the Estate of the artist so authorship is fully guaranteed; while conservation is excellent, since most of the works have not been ever shown. For this exhibition, presentation faithfully follows the written autobiography of the artist – his words, his chronology – which runs as a vinyl timeline around the gallery walls; the artist’s voice remains the primary thread of the display. Our role here was more editorial, interleaving artworks, documents, and photographs so that the archive and the art speak by themselves, and together tell the story of Chant’s life.
Regarding conservation, it is a big task and responsibility. With Avedissian, conservation begins with the material truth of the work: many pieces were made with locally sourced pigments bound with Arabic gum on corrugated cardboard – a fragile support – and textiles and costumes that bear wear as part of their life. We adopt preventive conservation first, and for the most vulnerable items (press clippings, notebooks, ephemera), we display facsimiles alongside archival originals kept in cases.
How did you approach structuring this retrospective, given the wide range of media and themes Avedissian worked with?
Far from being a conventional retrospective, the exhibition unfolds from the autobiography of the artist, that he wrote briefly before passing away. Showcased as a continuous timeline that circles the four walls of the gallery, it anchors a chronological sequence of works. Around this spine, different constellations are built, photographs (1970’s), textiles and costumes (1980s–90s), the corrugated-cardboard stencils including Icons of the Nile works (1990s), film stills, notebooks, posters, and press. Each constellation maps a recurring concern: the artist’s Eastward gaze of de-centring the Eurocentric canons; the vernacular archive (popular imagery, signage, traditional patterns); and the recurring dialogue between craft and modernity. This structure lets the audience experience Avedissian’s biography as method, not just as content.
Go East, Young Man is an invitation to journey through the life and work of Chant Avedissian in his own voice and on his own terms. Visitors encounter a biography written by the artist himself, whose silences speak as eloquently as his words, and whose materiality unfolds in works and documents that form an intimate constellation. Along this path, Avedissian emerges not only as a visual creator but also as an archivist of himself, as the curator of his own memory. By abandoning the triumphalist narrative of the market and embracing a more human and coherent account, the artist reminds us that true posterity is not measured in auction figures but in the ability to bequeath a vision of the world that continues to question our present.
How do you hope this exhibition reshapes or deepens public understanding of Avedissian’s contribution to art history?
First, by situating him not only as a maker of beloved images but as a thinker of images -someone who re-activated Arab visual memory through reproducible means (stencils, patterns, typography) while insisting on local know-how and materials. Also, I hope that the exhibition helps reading his practice as trans-regional rather than peripheral: Cairo in conversation with Samarkand, Bukhara or Aleppo; a cartography that challenges the West-centric itinerary of modernism and aligns with current debates ongoing across West Asia and elsewhere, which makes Chant’s legacy all the more relevant.
Finally, we hope visitors feel how Avedissian’s work reconciles tenderness and critique. The stencils are seductive, yes, but Avedissian’s practice also proposes a politics of form: popular icons reclaimed as carriers of collective memory; textiles and costumes elevated as history-bearing media; fans with his designs created to be mass-produced. I would love that with this exhibition, Avedissian would be seen less as a nostalgic chronicler of a golden era, and more as a sovereign editor of cultural memory: an artist convinced that canon formation can be written from here, wherever that might be, in our own languages, through our own images, and on our own terms.
Location: Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid.
Date: 11 September until 8 November 2025.