PROJECTS

07 I am the one who is in control
06 Toughest Love
05 Soft armour
04 Wishlist 
03 Cover works
02 Home without walls
01 Many arms that cannot reach



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Soft Armour2025

Details

Publication
2025 Sicky Magazine
for the full publication click here
Collaboration with photographer Olesya Parfenyuk

Publication
2025 Soft Armour, IMAGE Magazine
for the full publication click here
Collaboration with Lutz Hengst

Design and implementation: Erika Farina.
Curator IMAGE Magazine: Swantje Martach
Photos: Eva Balayan, Olesya Parfenyuk

As we enter the year 2025, a time seemingly defined by war, crises, and the resurgence of illiberal political styles even within traditionally democratic nations, engaging with the works of Eva Balayan gives a specific weight to the closing sentence of the abstract “Defending is existing”, which she provides in the context of a small textile art series she presents. Balayan‘s work builds on the observation that the external world is chaos. In contrast to this chaos of the outside world, the human requires a ‘soft’ form of armor. This self-armoring, as Balayan‘s explanations suggest, in her work becomes an autonomous existential end in itself. The idea that such self-armoring can become crucial for survival in the present, given the disorder in the world, seems plausible. In less globally entangled and confusing times (knowing, for example, little of phenomena like forms of pollution affecting the whole world nowadays and, by that, spurring modern or hybrid conflicts), yet in still somewhat rough times for the romantic conception of an ‘emotional artistic community,’ it would have been the external world that was deemed as being too orderly, or perhaps, all too deterministic. The inner world, in contrast, would have been understood as a haven of blossoming heterogeneity, if not productive chaos.

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Eva Balayan ©