ALINA GREGORIAN

Alina Gregorian is an artist, poet, and designer. She curated and appeared in the exhibition Talk to me in Parsley and Tambourines: Artists of the Armenian Diaspora (Babycastles in New York), and her work has appeared in Roadmaps (AGBU Headquarters in Yerevan, Armenia). She is the author of two chapbooks—Navigational Clouds (Monk Books) and Flags for Adjectives (Diez). Her poetry can be found in Boston Review, BOMB Magazine, Brooklyn Poets Anthology, among other publications. Alina graduated with a degree in Communication Design from Parsons School of Design.

Current projects include writing a monthly essay on Substack, working with Cleo Abramian on Yeraz, and volunteering at SKOG.

SHOW: All POETRY ART DESIGN CODING

Barev Azizam

Barev Azizam explores Persian words that have been incorporated into the Persian-Armenian dialect. The project looks at the in-betweenness of language; translation that doesn’t always help with understanding; and how language evolves and influences a culture. Barev means “hello” in Armenian and azizam means “dear” in Persian. The prototype consists of 26 flashcards. One side of the flashcard depicts the iconography of the word being translated; the other side shows transliterations, in Armenian and English. The flashcards are featured in a Persian box, juxtaposing the modern design of the cards with the more ornate features of the box.

Category
design

Coffee Poetics

Coffee Poetics stems from an event organized at Storm Books & Candy in Brooklyn, NY. In July 2024, we invited people to join us for an Armenian coffee cup reading — each guest was served a cup of Armenian coffee, and after drinking the coffee, Anahit Pogosian performed a reading of the symbols from the coffee grinds inside the cup. The cups were photographed by Nadia Bedj, and the symbols are woven into poems by Alina for our upcoming book. The proceeds from the event went to Artsakh via All For Armenia.

Category
design, poetry

Flags for Adjectives

Flags for Adjectives (DIEZ, 2017) consists of dialogue poems — poems written with anonymous characters who speak to each other. I wanted to create little plays, but with characters who were not named. Sometimes they have arguments with each other, and often they are playfully gibbering. Whenever I read poems from this chapbook at a venue, I asked someone from the audience to read the second voice with me, thus creating a feeling of surprise, newness, and mystery.

Category
poetry

Yeraz

Yeraz is an archive for reimagining SWANA rituals, each starting with a prompt. Yeraz is Cleo Abramian and Alina Gregorian, both Barska-Hye (Armenians with family from Iran). Yeraz means “dream” in Armenian.

Category
design, coding

Talk to Me in Parsley and Tambourines

After the Armenian Genocide, many Armenians were forced out of their homeland and into neighboring countries. The Armenian Diaspora is vast, varied, and always changing. The central theme for members of the Armenian Diaspora is being Armenian, though cultural references, food, and dialect might differ. For this exhibit, artists were asked to submit work responding to the idea of the Armenian Diaspora. The artists identify as Armenian, but each has a unique perspective on their shared history. In 2017, I pitched this exhibit idea to Babycastles, an independent videogame gallery in NYC. I submitted two Persian carpet glitches and ֆիլինգս, which is transliterated from the Armenian word for ‘feelings’. Participating artists: Liana Aghajanian, Shakar Mujukian, Kamee Abrahamian, Rehan Miskci, Alina Gregorian, Caroline Partamian. Opening reception included oud musician Raffi Wartanian.

Category
art

Navigational Clouds

Navigational Clouds (Monk Books, 2015) is a chapbook of poems filled with fantastical, other-worldly environments that have a sense of the campy nature that Americana can provide. Oranges are flying, people are laughing, and there is a feeling that anything can happen, and everything already did.

Category
poetry

Gradient Fields

Gradient Fields is one of the first websites I created. It's a one-page website that goes through the rainbow as a gradient.

Category
design, coding

Blue Clock

Blue Clock is a website I designed and created that uses 9 colors to represent the time. It is inspired by Dutch graphic designer Karel Marten’s clock, Three Times (in Blue and Yellow). Each number in Blue Clock is shown as a hue of blue or white; the higher the number the darker the hue of blue, and the lower the number the lighter the hue of blue. Zero is shown as white. The clock uses the 24-hour clock.

Category
design, coding

Scattered Time

Scattered Time is a website I designed and created that shows the seconds, minutes, and hours in real time. When you refresh the screen, the numbers change locations on the page.

Category
design, coding

Poetry Mural

TF Cornerstone asked a group of poets from New York City to write poems about the city for their residential mural project. I chose to write about a neighborhood in Queens, where I was born and lived for the first three years of my life.

Category
poetry