Armand Yervant Tufenkian is an Armenian filmmaker and artist, born in 1988 to parents from Aleppo, Syria.
His films include Accession (2018), which maps an informal network of seed exchange through letter correspondence. It has screened at festivals such as the Viennale, Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, Mar del Plata, Underdox, and as part of the 'Reimagining the Land' retrospective at Sheffield Doc/Fest and the 'Conscious Landscapes' exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, among others.
Previous films include in lightning Agnes (2014), made at an elevation of ten thousand feet in the Mount Zirkel Wilderness of Colorado and featured in the Millennium Film Journal, Kathryn Ramey’s book Experimental Filmmaking, and exhibited at the Cinema for All Pavilion at the Thailand Biennale in 2024.
Tufenkian's work has been supported recently by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and residencies at Fogo Island Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Monson Arts, and previously by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Puffin Foundation, and City of Chicago's Individual Artist Program.
He did doctoral studies at Duke University and studied film and fine arts at the California Institute of the Arts. He has worked as a fire lookout in the Sequoia forest of the Sierra Nevada and as a lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego, and currently teaches in the Cinema Department at SUNY Binghamton.
In the Manner of Smoke, a long-form observation of disparate perspectives
on forest fires, will premiere later next year.
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Recent Screenings and Exhibitions
in lightning Agnes
Thailand Biennale, Cinema for All Pavilion | February 2024
Submerged Narratives
Fogo Island Arts | May-June 2023
Accession
Block Museum, Northwestern University | February 2024
Visible Evidence, Università degli Studi de Udine | September 2023
Bienal Ciudad y Ciencia, Círculo de Bellas Artes Madrid | February 2023
Braunschweig University of Art | November 2020
Reimagining the Land, retrospective at Sheffield Doc/Fest | Aug-Sep 2020
Mimesis Documentary Festival | August 2020
Our Habitats Programme | May 2020
Daimon Muestra Internacional de Cine | April 2020
UnionDocs | February 2020
Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje | December 2019
Pravo Ljudski Sarajevo | December 2019
Viennale | October 2019
Art of the Real at Lincoln Center | April 2019
Mar del Plata | November 2018
Underdox | October 2018
Temporary Fields
Lithium Gallery | November 2018
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Contact
armandtufenkian [at] gmail
Recent Press
Lucía Salas and Christopher Small. #3 Reimagining the Land. We Can't Go Home Again (podcast). 2020
Lauren Wagner. Thought provoking cinema. Viennale Hören (podcast). 2019
David Perrin. "Art of the Real 2019." MUBI Notebook. 2019
Jacob Zicheng Zhang. "An Archival Impulse, or Not: Accessioning." gallery no one. 2019
Dustin Chang. "Art of the Real: A Celebration of Non-Narrative Filmmaking." ScreenAnarchy. 2019
Lucía Salas. "Semillas del pasado/Seeds from the Past." Mar del Plata International Film Festival. 2018
Neil Young. "Far from the shallow now: two highlights from Underdox." Modern Times Review. 2018