Soft Power, 2025

The object Soft Power consists of eight Chinese towels with conventional decorative patterns. There is irony in this work, but also unease. Imperialism has abandoned the benevolent rhetoric of "soft power" in favor of open coercion.

The work reminds us that tensions in the contemporary world continue to escalate, while military conflicts are becoming ever more dangerous, making the use of nuclear weapons a genuine possibility. New technologies deployed on the battlefield, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), further intensify this threat. War is becoming a duel between autonomous machines.

Technology is dehumanizing because it reduces language to a sequence of operations subordinated to the external ends of technological production. The most appropriate name for this sequence is information—the language of the technological age.

— Vardan Jaloyan