If painters Narine Zolyan and Harutyun Zulumyan were in Moscow now, the wife and husband would likely be sitting in a court dock as defenders.

The artists are facing criminal charges for an exhibition they put on last year in Russia.

The exhibition, entitled “Beware, Religion!” featured the work of 40 painters from several countries, whose installations commented on religion.

The show was supposed to run for 20 days at the Andrey Sakharov Center, but on the third day, a mob of religious zealots attacked the exhibition, spraying paint onto some of the pieces and spraying onto the walls: “You are cursed! You hate orthodoxy!” Police had to come to the center to disburse the angry mob.

Among the works attacked was Zolyan’s video in which she, wearing black, constantly writes over a saying of a Zen Buddhist monk’s words: “I am the only one in the sky and under the sky who deserves honor.” Then she washes the words away and with the clean fabric forms handrails. Over the remnants of Zolyan’s exhibit, vandals wrote “sacrilege”. (Click here to see images http://warrax.croco.net/77/expo.html)

A court in Moscow acquitted the vandals of charges and then initiated a case against organizers of the exhibition, charging them with creating ethnic and religious discord.

A trial began on November with three of the organizers in court, while Zolyan and Zulumyan are in Yerevan, hoping to avoid prosecution.

“My disgust for Moscow has turned into fear,” Zolyan says.

The couple moved to Moscow in 1993. They participated in and organized a series of exhibitions and taught fine arts in an art school.

The opening of the court case has come during a public crusade against the artists. Well-known Russian intellectuals and spiritual figures issue statements condemning the exhibition. One statement signed by writers Valentin Rasputin, Vasiliy Belov, film director Nikita Mikhalkov and other famous people says what the organizers did is worse than Soviet-era attacks on religion. “Here there is well-thought Satanism, its new stage,” it reads. “Here an insult has been caused to national sacred things, orthodoxy, the Russian people, the faith of our fathers, to Russia itself.”

Seven artists (including the organizers) were Armenian. A commentary in a Moscow newspaper called on the Armenian community to “think very seriously about officially condemning the activities of the painters.”

It is not the first case that a campaign is waged against artists in Russia. In 1998, another painter of Armenian origin, Avdei Ter-Oganyan chopped about ten paper icons with an axe during a performance at one exhibition. A criminal case was instituted, however Ter-Oganyan managed to escape to the Czech Republic. He sent his work to the “Beware, Religion!” exhibition as a Czech citizen, where he engraved “40º”, revolution, Russian vodka, Lenin on the edges of the copies of icons. The work showed that orthodoxy replaces the idea of communism.

“The quality of the exhibition is not important for us, what was important was the thought that was to be voiced,” says Zolyan. “Religion is a serious problem in Russia today. There are no ideas and they want to fill in the vacuum with religion, consequently religion becomes aggressive. Everywhere, in the subways, in the streets religious literature is sold next to porn magazines, vodkas bear the images of churches. Spiritual leaders stand next to high-ranking state officials. The exhibition was not intended to insult the religious feelings of the faithful. The issue of religion had a creative, social, philosophical and civil direction and it was from that viewpoint that the artists tried to approach the phenomenon of religion.”

Very few people could visit the exhibition during the three days, but it made big news in Russia.

Even the Duma made a statement demanding that the Prosecutor’s Office should open criminal proceedings. Two months after the exhibition Moscow’s Taganka Prosecutor’s Office instituted a criminal case, which threatens the painters with two to five years in prison.

Experts from the Prosecutor’s Office give an 80-page conclusion in which the exhibition was qualified as sacrilege and disrespect for God. Amid widespread attacks the painters had some protection though. In the “Index” monthly (http://index.org.ru/journal/20/riklin20.html Russian philosopher Mikhail Riklin called the expert conclusion a new science, “pogromology”, which he says is more dangerous than censorship: “Instead of restraining extremists and protecting the law, a considerable part of the state machinery and mass media, on the contrary, take the extremists under their protection and restrain the law, giving it an arbitrary interpretation. Now they are fighting for orthodoxy with methods very reminiscent of those with the aid of which they were fighting against it during the Soviet times.”

The trial at Moscow’s Taganka court is now continuing. The defenders plead not guilty.

Zulumyan wanted to go to the trial: “I didn’t want to leave Samadurov (Director of the Sakharov Center) alone.” However, Zulumyan has no place or means to live in Moscow now, besides he was advised both by his friends from Moscow and by his wife against going.

Zolyan says that Moscow has become a detestable city for her where she feels like a hunted beast. People looking like Caucasians are stopped and humiliated every second and the nationalists are freely spreading their ideas and it gets more dangerous day by day. She does not intend to go to Moscow any time soon, even though her mother and daughter are there:

“Skinheads stage demonstrations unimpeded, and I am supposed to be responsible for my face, that I look like a Chechen. It is written on my face – litso kavkazskoi natsionalnosti (in Russian – a person of Caucasian nationality). Moscow was not like this during the Soviet times (Zolyan graduated from the Moscow Arts Academy), it was not like this five years ago.”

One of her latest works is a series of photographs: there is the author on the central photograph covered with a black oriental veil, her finger on her lips – shush; on the other photos are signings – don’t speak. “A woman, or generally an oriental person is mute in Russia, has no right to engage in arts,” she explains.

The artists will continue to create in Armenia. But they say Armenian artists, unlike the Russians, are detached from reality:

“Armenia is like a house mourning a dead person, there is neither life nor fervor here. There is no life outside the family,” Zolyan says.

Armenianow.com