The great philosopher Sigmund Freud qualified melancholia as the inability to mourn and let go of a “loss of a more ideal kind”. It is a condition that seems particularly pertinent to our times of permanent strife, as seen in the haunting 2008 film Melancholia by Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz, which looks at the emotional and psychological vacuum left after years of political violence and oppression in the Filipins.
Expanding on these themes, the exhibition Black Sun: The Cold Spell of Melancholia brings Diaz’s film into a cross-cultural dialogue with around twenty works by historical and contemporary artists from Armenia and the Diaspora. Reflecting the diverse ways through which Armenian artists have addressed the idea of loss from the 19th century to our days, these artworks reveal the surprising importance of melancholia as a painful, but also sublime process through which art can contemplate the unfathomable and retain a connection to absolute ideals and the impossible search for truth.
