WHW Akademija

Photo by: Googo

Varduhi Balyan (b. 1992) is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based between Istanbul and Armenia. As a migrant in Istanbul, she navigates a bureaucratic limbo, caught between two countries that share no diplomatic ties and remain divided by historical and political tensions. With a background in journalism and civil society, her work focuses on social memory, human rights, and displacement.

For years, Balyan worked at Agos newspaper and various civil society organizations, where she explored themes of memory and identity alongside other critical issues. Her transition to visual storytelling began with a collaboration with the Public Television of Armenia, which led to her first short documentary, Dialogue in a Basket (2020), an exploration of micro-sociological narratives.

She is currently developing her first feature documentary, The Absence of 1, a deeply personal exploration of displacement rooted in her family’s unspoken history and the village where she spent her childhood summers. Through the film, she reconnects with a formative childhood figure and documents the linguistic and cultural memory of the place. The project extends beyond the documentary itself, encompassing archival research and a dictionary of local idioms that capture the landscape, customs, and everyday life of the region.

Her work on The Absence of 1 earned her a fellowship with BAK’s post-academic research program, hosted by the Istanbul Biennial’s ÇAP program. Additionally, she was selected for WHW Akademija 2025 as one of 12 participating artists, further expanding the project’s scope within a critical artistic and research-driven context.

‍

Artist's Instagram and Twitter (X).

1. 1988, photo by: Arshak Harutyunyan; 2. 2023, photo by: Arshak Harutyunyan; 3. – 6. Excerpt from The Absence of 1, photo by: Arshak Harutyunyan

Artist statement

I am Varduhi Balyan, a filmmaker and researcher working at the intersection of visual storytelling, language, and memory. My practice emerges from lived histories of displacement, inherited silences, and the gaps between what is remembered and what is forgotten. With a background in social sciences, journalism, and rights-based work, I use the documentary form as a meeting ground—where personal archives, fieldwork, and collective memory weave together to resist erasure and hold space for what was, and what still echoes.

My early film Dialogue in a Basket (2021) captures everyday gestures of neighbourly care and estrangement during the pandemic, playing with the relationship between proximity and understanding. Through the simple act of exchanging goods via a shared basket between balconies, the film raises questions of intimacy, language, and generational distance. This work marked the beginning of my shift from text to moving image and continues to shape how I approach the complexity of relationships formed by history, silence, and care.

Through The Absence of 1, I explore a layered terrain of forced migration, linguistic memory, and visual absence across the South Caucasus. Anchored in a vernacular photo archive and my own filmic research, the project unfolds through multiple forms: a documentary film, an exhibition, and a living dictionary of idioms tied to place and loss. I work closely with people, landscapes, and stories, often in tension with institutional narratives.

I move between the roles of filmmaker, listener, translator, and co-dreamer—allowing grief, longing, and fragmented memory to shape not only what is shown, but how we come to know it. My practice is grounded in collaborative processes, collective memory work, and attention to what language fails to preserve.

No items found.