Lika Ambartsumyan

Graphic Designer

Portfolio: https://likaxjimin.github.io/ham-lik-alb/ 

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Lika Ambartsumyan (b. 2000, Moscow) is an Armenian conceptual graphic designer whose work examines how visual symbols construct identity and social expectation. Through bold, minimal compositions, she deconstructs inherited narratives and repositions traditional imagery within contemporary discourse. Her practice operates at the intersection of design, cultural critique, and emerging futures.

Red Apple

This work reexamines the Armenian tradition of the red apple, historically associated with female virginity and family honor. Rather than depicting a resolved future, the piece captures the fragile beginning of transformation.

At the center, a topless woman stands calmly and looks directly at the viewer. Her nudity is not presented as vulnerability, but as deliberate self-possession — a refusal to treat the body as something to hide, prove, or justify. She cuts open the red apple she has been given. The fruit bleeds. The violence belongs to the symbol, not to her.

The apple’s blood represents how tradition can wound through expectation and control. By exposing it, she reveals the constructed nature of purity as a social demand rather than an inherent truth.

Surrounding her, faceless male figures fill the background, embodying collective surveillance and inherited norms. In the foreground, a kneeling male figure gestures upward — a moment of destabilization rather than domination. The system has not disappeared, but it has begun to lose its certainty.

Within the theme “Dreams for the Future,” the work does not present an idealized resolution. Instead, it visualizes the first act of agency: the moment when imposed symbols are confronted and redefined. The future imagined here is gradual — not sudden, not perfect — emerging through conscious acts of resistance that challenge inherited structures.

The red apple shifts from a marker of validation to a site of exposure. Change begins not with silence, but with refusal.

Heartbeat

For this project, Lika selected the performance The Other Rest Energy (1980) by Marina Abramović and Ulay. She cut out a heart from plaster and hung it on a thin thread, thus showing that the heart can break easily.

This is Lika Ambartsumyan’s graphic score of “Artsakh” (Armenian: “Արցախ”), an instrumental folk song from Armenian contemporary composer Ara Gevorgyan’s 1999 album Ani.
The designer used colorful shapes to express her musical ideas of 5:37 minute long composition on 11 pages.

Back cover of the graphic score of Artsakh.