Marie Yevkiné Tirard: Tremors of Transmission

Studio 20 Collective presents Tremors of Transmission, a solo exhibition by Marie Yevkiné Tirard, at Studio 20 in Yerevan curated by Momik Vardanyan. The exhibition runs from September 28 to October 22, 2026.

What reaches us from the past? By what means does it reach us, through whom and through what, and what alters in the very act of transmission? How does a voice, a language, a song, a memory go on living once it can no longer remain the same? And what do we hear when we listen not only to what has been preserved, but to the silences, to what, in time, may no longer be audible at all?

Paris-born Marie Yevkiné Tirard traces the movement of memory through the moments in which language, voice, image, object, or silence passes from one person to another and is transformed in the passage. What survives the process? What is lost, and what is made anew? What does it mean to become, however briefly, the listener to someone else's story, and, perhaps later, its next transmitter?

Almost a century ago, in 1934, a young woman living in France, Yevkiné Diarian, Marie's great-grandmother, wrote in one of her poetry notebooks that she wished a willow to be planted on her grave after her death.

This quest around the notebook of poems constitutes the foundation of Marie’s artistic practice. She decided to give a voice to this family archive into various artistic forms, exploring its survival through an embodied proximity. Marie transforms the poems of her ancestor as “scores” for creation, driven by an intimate call. A poetic memory of disappearance is translated into healing melodies.

What Yevkiné wrote is a plain request addressed to the future, and yet it already contains within it the time of transmission: years later, someone must read those lines, hold them in mind, and either fulfill the request or continue it in their own way. From that moment on, memory is no longer merely something kept; it depends on who receives it and what they do with it. And the willow, if it is ever planted, will grow among other people, other experiences, in another time.

Here the question of listening shifts as well. Gascia Ouzounian’s concept of counterlistening proposes attending not only to what has reached us and been preserved, but to silences, gaps, erasures; to everything that may no longer be fully audible. Listening thus becomes a question of one's own position: who is listening, through what, and what lies beyond the limits of that listening?

A similar preoccupation lies in Marie’s work. The artist returns the poetry of Yevkiné Diarian to her ancestral lands, taking as a request a line from her poems “One day, whether I like it or not, I will return all my desires to the black earth”. This emotional act extended into a dialogue, while Marie’s strives to listen to the ruins, the earth and the memory of the Armenian landscape. Drawing from Komitas theories, in which music may have been invented while listening to nature, Marie voices the melodies of ghosts after listening to the mountains.

For the duration of the exhibition, a small library will also occupy a corner of Studio 20’s kitchen. A space for reading, singing, listening.

Marie Yevkiné Tirard is a multimedia artist, experimental musician, singer, and writer. She works with sound, poetry, analog images, film, textiles, and family archives. Her work is preoccupied with memory, listening, language, distance, and transmission, and above all with the moments in which preserved material resurfaces in another person, another body, another time. In recent years, she has been exploring Armenian modal music and the ashugh and gusan traditions, drawing them into her experimental sound practice. She also creates open scores and participative situations in which the work does not necessarily end with the artist’s performance, but may continue through someone else's listening, remembering, singing, or interpretation.