Armenak

Armenak Khachatryan (Khachaturian) was an Armenian outsider (or folk/naive/primitivist) artist who lived and worked in Baku, Azerbaijan, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Armenak was discovered by the legendary filmmaker Sergei Parajanov who immediately called his renowned documentarian friend Mikhail Vartanov in Armenia and urged him to make a film, but the studio authorities didn’t permit him to create it, as usual. While Vartanov’s filmed material was never made into a film, one of his revered essays (which he collectively liked to call Unmailed Letters) was about Armenak, and it made the cover of the top literary magazines in the late 1980s.

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Parajanov-Vartanov Institute