Choghakate Kazarian: Unquicken the Pace — Curating as Medium and Letting Ideas Ripen

In Episode 9 of The Russi Hive Podcast, Alejandra sits down with Choghakate Kazarian—art historian, curator, and writer—to talk about curating as a creative medium.Kazarian’s story begins in several languages at once: Armenian, French, English, Italian—each one carrying its own atmosphere, its own way of thinking, its own private weather. Born in Armenia, raised in France, and shaped by years of looking across cultures, she speaks about language not as translation, but as a way of seeing.From there, they move into the hidden architecture of exhibition-making: the research, the rhythm, the negotiations with space and loans, and the quiet labor that allows a show to feel inevitable. For Kazarian, the curator’s hand should guide without announcing itself; when an exhibition works, the machinery recedes, and the artist comes more fully into view.They discuss Lucio Fontana, Henry Darger, Louis Michel Eilshemius, the slippery usefulness of labels like outsider art and Art Brut, and Kazarian’s unexpected turn into fashion with her Chloé exhibition at the Jewish Museum. Darger becomes a turning point: after years shaped by Duchamp and other modernist touchstones, Kazarian describes encountering his work as a before-and-after experience—one that unsettled her categories and opened a different way of seeing artistic intensity and necessity.The episode closes with a meditation on time: how ideas ripen, how exhibitions continue after they close, and why slowness can be a form of resistance in a culture obsessed with productivity. Through the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Kazarian reflects on revision, unfinishedness, and the delicate discipline of bringing a work to closure without pretending it is ever truly complete.Original music and sonic identity by Antfood.Sound design: Federico Casazza.Follow The Russi Hive:YouTubeInstagramTikTokSubstack