It is called Wish you were here and shows images from many corners of the world, including India, Bangladesh and Nagorno-Karabakh. It will last until October 17.
Garik Avanesian, who is of Armenian origin, was born in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1959. He had a talent for pictorial imagination since childhood, he studied at a photography school in Baku. Then came the years of exile caused by the conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijanis and with them the limitation of creative work. Between 1988 and 1992 he worked in Kazakhstan, in the early 1990s in Moscow, and from 1995 permanently in Prague, where he found an existential background and peace to return to photographic work.
Garik Avanesian has had many individual and group exhibitions around the world as well as publishing activities. Since 2005, he has been the chairman of the Czech Federation of Photographic Art.
In 2016, the book Garik Avanesian and his Armenians was published in Czech. It contains a set of images that capture the daily life of people in the Nagorno-Karabakh region and in Armenia from 1987 to 2015. They are also supplemented by the author’s text. Avanesian’s next book was devoted to the people of Bangladesh, which the photographer visited several times between 2016 and 2020.
Visitors will find a selection of images from the last ten years of the author’s work in the set of 90 color and black-and-white large-scale photographs, which will be on display in the cloister of the Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows from today until October 17.
They will be able to look into the difficult life of war-scarred, but still proud Armenians and into the homes of Uzbek Roma, Muslims called Luli. Through the images, they will visit the high-altitude pastures of Kyrgyzstan, where herds of horses run around the yurts of local residents, or they will get to know the Chinese region of Xinjiang, inhabited mainly by Uyghurs, on whose territory is not only the second largest desert in the world, the Gobi, but also the Himalayan eight-thousanders.
They can also get to know the participants in the traditional dramatic horse-riding games of the Buzkas in the mountains of Tajikistan. They will also visit diverse India or Bangladesh.
