By RUMEYSA KIGER / ISTANBUL,
A portrait from the exhibition “Armenian Family Stories and Lost Landscapes” at Depo in İstanbul.
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. www.depoistanbul.net
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 İstanbul.
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