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ISTANBUL: Traces of three Armenian families in Depo show

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  • ISTANBUL: Traces of three Armenian families in Depo show

    Today's Zaman, Turkey
    Jan 31 2015

    Traces of three Armenian families in Depo show


    For the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Depo culture and
    arts center is putting on several exhibitions about families who were
    forced to leave their homes and properties or killed in various cities
    in Anatolia.

    The first of these shows `Armenian Family Stories and Lost
    Landscapes,' featuring a photography and research project by Helen
    Sheehan about three families who are currently living in diaspora, is
    currently on view in the Tophane neighborhood of Ä°stanbul.

    Irish artist Sheehan became interested in the subject while she was a
    teacher at the Mechitarist Seminary School on the Armenian Island of
    St. Lazzaro in Venice in the 1990s. In 2009, she decided to do
    research on Armenians in diaspora in Paris and London where she was
    able to find members of these families. The ancestors of the people
    she found were from the eastern Anatolian city of Diyarbakır, known to
    them as Digranagerd, and from Marash, Zeytun and Van region.

    For the exhibition she took a series of photographs taken in the
    properties of these people, sometimes projecting their old photos onto
    the wall of a dilapidated house, or with the daily objects of family
    members such as a scarf or a pocket watch.

    Asena Günal, program coordinator at Depo, explains in an interview
    with Sunday's Zaman that they are aiming at putting on shows exposing
    the lost past of the Armenian people. `Rather than documents showing
    numbers or facts, we are trying to exhibit human stories and we
    believe this is more effective. In our previous exhibitions on the
    same topic, it was clearly seen that once these people were living
    here together with us and we were next to each other in cultural and
    social spheres, they contributed a lot to the cultural heritage of the
    area.

    "We will continue to do so. This year is very important because it
    marks the 100th anniversary of the genocide and it has a symbolic
    meaning. So we will be showcasing a number of shows both from Armenian
    artists living in diaspora and also artists from Turkey who are
    interested in the topic,' she explains.

    Regarding the current exhibition, Günal says the photographer is
    attempting to bring their past back to places she calls lost
    landscapes. `She is kind of reviving these families in the lands from
    where they were forced to move,' she notes.

    In his article in the show's catalogue, Dickran Kouymijan writes that
    this research is about memory, lost landscapes and the destruction of
    the concept of home, themes underlining this exhibition. "In one
    passage while Marianna [Patricia] is looking at an album of old
    photographs she sees one of her mother as a young, elegant woman in
    Beirut. She exclaims, 'I would have been just like her, surrounded by
    admirers at parties, dancing to Arabic music so beautifully that
    everyone stops and stares. I stare. It is how things should have
    been.'

    "But as we see in Helen Sheehan's pictures, no matter how hauntingly
    beautiful they are, things are not like they should have been. The
    dilemma is how to live with that reality: the destroyed concept of
    home or homeland, the haunted mind of memory? Or as Patricia Sarrafian
    Ward has one of Marianna's relatives say, 'The past will never be
    undone',' he writes.

    `Sheehan's photographs and her profound texts on exile and
    extermination, on Genocide and its negation, her determination through
    art to allow the Armenians to inhabit again their homes, tries and for
    most succeeds in creating optimal conditions to re-imagine a past that
    in many respects has in fact been resurrected, at least in Diyarbakir,
    renewed like the Church of St. Giragos has been restored,' Kouymijan
    writes, adding that Diyarbakır is full of people searching for a new
    identity, and though it is not the one his own ancestors knew, it is,
    nevertheless, Armenian.

    `Armenian Family Stories and Lost Landscapes' will run through Feb. 8
    at Depo in Tophane. For more information, visit www.depoistanbul.net


    http://www.todayszaman.com/arts-culture_traces-of-three-armenian-families-in-depo-show_371217.html

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