THE MUSEUM OF PAIN

(The post is in progress! There is so much to add and so much more is coming)

The Museum of Pain is my second project with the Shit Museum collective. 
July 5-20, 2025 // Bjij gallery. 

I mean I don't know why exactly I do what I do but I better do them. Otherwise they will turn into black holes inside of me. One not so obvious reason is to exhibit my stuff: 5 out 14 works presented were mine. 

Hi, you’re entering the Museum of Pain — or more precisely, its storage room. Pain museums aren’t exactly spectacles, especially the small, regional ones. They run on almost no budget, can go months without a single visitor, and their exhibitions stay the same for decades. These museums are unified in style, and they’re everywhere — as of 2023, there are about 8 billion of them, and the number keeps growing.
Like any museum, pain museums keep their best items on permanent display. Each one is known for something specific: the largest collection of heartbreaks, misfortunes, or questionable decisions.
Also like most museums, pain museums store their less important artifacts in the dusty obscurity of the basement. They don’t throw them away, because every now and then someone from the governor’s office or the Ministry of Pain shows up to conduct what they call a “life audit.” The auditor examines the washed-out shards, blunt objects, and colorful beads. Then she (it’s always a middle-aged woman) slurps sugary coffee from a not-so-fine Turkish china cup, takes a bite of expired chocolate, signs a yellow form certifying that all the pains are in place, and disappears until the next crisis.
Like many museums, pain museums receive donations — fragments of other people’s pain from books, songs, films, friends, and neighbors (we later cite them as references in our own books, songs, and films, after changing the names of the friends and neighbors). The items in storage are mostly labeled, though more often than not, they simply find their place in the organized chaos.
These pains hold little value. If they have any, it’s probably due to their age or sheer absurd cruelty.
In this storage room, you’ll find fragments of the collective pain of the Shit Museum Collective — diaries, journals, documentation, confessions, intrusive thoughts, and more.

Carine A.
Artist/ Curator

About Shit Museum

Shit Museum is a collective with vague boundaries, formed for an exhibition of the same name that opened on March 25, 2024, in the toilet on the 3rd floor of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Yerevan.

The artists of the collective were brought together by the exhibition’s author, Carine Aroyan — a Yerevan-based multimedia artist who spent some time in that toilet doing German lessons on Duolingo and contemplating the ever-dry shower.

The first exhibition was a collection of shit-related and shit-inspired stories and works by fantastic artists with a great sense of humor. The honorable members of the inaugural Shit Museum are:
Mary Hovsepyan, Yerevan
Mary Badalian, Yerevan
Maria Zakaryan, Yerevan
Ruben Shekspir, Stepanavan
Arevik Aroyan (only in spirit), Stepanavan
Serge Manouguian, Beirut
Shamiram Khachatryan, Yerevan
Lena Nersesyan, Yerevan
Nareh Petrosyan, Yerevan
Carine Aroyan, Yerevan

The second one, titled Museum of Pain, invites us to see ourselves as museums — storages of random, sometimes harmful objects, deemed precious and beautiful.

The artist lineup has grown — and so has the pain. New dramas have joined the Museum of Pain archive: Tirgan Minas, Ilya Rodin, Arevik Aroyan (this time - in flesh), and a directorial duo Alex Khalatyan and John Xu. this Saturday, July 5.

This one was brought more of exhaustion than joy, but I'll probably do another one sometime next year, because you know, behind every exhibition there is a basic need of a human (but also of a wolf) to be seen and recognized by the pack.

Works

Mary Badalian // The Book of Malaise 

Serge Manouguian, Sketches (Restless in Beirut)

Mary Hovsepyan, Tooth Story, True Story

Arevik Aroyan

Zara, 2020 - 2025
extruded polystyrene, papier-mâché, acrylic paint

Back in 2020 I decided to make a friend’s a portrait sculpture for her birthday because I had no money to buy a gift.

It was a time of darkness and disorientation, rejected job applications, and unsolicited advices. I failed to finish the sculpture and never gave it to Zara.

My collage about the trip to Iran that didn't happen.