1992
Avlos
Production design for a short film, Armenfilm, Yerevan
Galstyan built the scrap-metal machines that stand in the film’s stony landscape.
Early works
From the first installations in Yerevan in the early 1990s to video and the Moscow years. Most of this work survives only in photographs.
1993
Identification
Modern Art Museum of Yerevan. Curated by Sona Balasanyan
His first contemporary art exhibition. He showed two installations, Totalitarian System and My Second-Grade Diary: clay reliefs of faces in cut-out frames hung in rows from the ceiling, and rows of clay pieces stamped with numbers on the floor.
1993
Youth Exhibition
House of Artists, Yerevan
Clay figures sealed in glass cylinders with light bulbs, mounted on a wall under a hospital-style label.
1995
Rhinoceros
Performance, Goy Theatre Laboratory, Yerevan
After a staging of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, the audience found the only corridor out of the theatre filled with rhinoceroses of wet, unfired clay. To leave, they had to walk over them.
1996
Process
Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan
An old mattress split open, with dozens of black ceramic beetles crawling out of the straw and across the floor.
1999
Borders of the Clay
Video, three films. Shown at Closed City, Hay-Art Cultural Center, Yerevan
Galstyan’s first video works: hands and a face pressing into clay on a screen. They are on the Films page.
2000
Clay Border
Solo exhibition, Spider & Mouse Gallery, Moscow. Curated by Marina Perchikhina
Part of a larger project planned with the late Alexander Melkonyan. It led, years later, to Event in a Long Shot.
2003
Caution: Religion!
Group exhibition, Sakharov Center, Moscow
A video projected into a tall white cloth that falls to the floor, where rows of small clay vessels stand.