‘Modality’ presents Armenian artist Vahram Aghasyan’s images of unfinished Soviet residential buildings set within a snow-covered Armenian landscape. Construction began in 1988 as part of a planned urban development intended to house people displaced by a major earthquake, but the project was never completed. Photographed in 2008, and still unchanged decades later, these structures remain suspended between intention and realisation.

Aghasyan approaches the site not as ruin, but as incomplete form. Never inhabited and never resolved, the repeated buildings suggest a wider condition of interrupted planning and failed urban expansion. At the same time, they retain the outline of an earlier social vision: a projected environment of collective living, order and continuity that was imagined but never realised.

Snow plays a central role in how the work is seen. It reduces the visual field, softens detail and isolates the buildings against the landscape, heightening their stillness and reinforcing the sense that these sites exist outside active time. In ‘Modality’, Aghasyan reflects on an unrealised plan that remains physically present, holding together memory, suspension and the quiet persistence of a lost future within the Armenian landscape.

Presented in Belfast as part of the wider Armenian-curated project ‘Vanishing Winters:Snowfall in Memory’, curated by Tereza Davtyan, the work benefits from a collaboration between Davtyan and Belfast Photo Festival Director Toby Smith developed through the ‘Climate Adaptation for Creatives’ Grant and Mentoring Program 2025 - 2026, supported by Black Mountain College and the British Council. Through this exchange, contemporary Armenian work is presented in Belfast within a wider conversation around climate, memory and cultural exchange.

Artist Bio:
Vahram Aghasyan is an Armenian artist, curator and theorist based in Yerevan. Working across contemporary art and moving image, he has exhibited internationally at major biennials, museums and galleries including the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, Kiasma Museum in Helsinki and the 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. His work has also been presented in Lyon and at the Armenian Pavilion of the 51st Venice Biennale, and is held in collections including MuHKA, Belgium, and the Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem.