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HTMLText_C03AF648_DB97_532C_41E9_33376B0B8E76.html = Ali Cat. Leeds
Tasseography Print
Archival print on gold paper
8x10 inches
Tasseography is the study of coffee grounds and/or tea leaves for the act of divination. It is a practice that has been passed down through the women on my Armenian side of the family and was taught to me by my mother, she from her mother, and so on. As I would watch my Nana read the coffee grounds from the soorj (Armenian coffee) prepared for family and friends, I would notice how often times she would see what she would want to say. These are just some of the things I want to see in the world.
Prints were produced during the Artsakh war in 2020. 100% of the proceeds from all Tasseography prints will be donated to provide emergency aid, (including food, water, medication, clothing, diapers, formula, sanitary products and more) to the people of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) via the Looys Program by Kooyrigs.
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Ali Cat. Leeds is an artist and print maker living on unceded Cowlitz, Multnomah and Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde land at the confluence of two rivers, also know as Portland, Oregon. She produces her work under the name Entangled Roots Press. Her prints mingle the literal and metaphorical to illuminate and comment upon the world around us. Relief, screen, and letterpress prints span from the carnage of clear-cuts to the beauty of peoples movements. Ali’s prints pull from ancestral herstories and push towards liberatory futures; entangling lessons from gardens, symbols in coffee cups, woven threads from Armenia and Euskal Herria, to the printed page. Ali received her BFA at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. She completed an artist-residency at Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires in 2014, and was a member of Flight 64, a member-run, nonprofit print studio, from 2015- 2018. Ali currently works as the Print Studio Technician at PNCA.
www.entangledroots.com
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About the artist:
Scout Tufankjian
Fog, 2020
Photographs
Having watched most of the [Artsakh] war from afar, I somehow thought that things would become clearer, easier to understand, when I was actually in Artsakh. The opposite was true. In Artsakh, I - along with everyone else - was lost in the fog. Nothing was clear. Everything was unknown. Everywhere I went, all people could talk about was this sense of their lives being completely out of their hands. Largely cut off from the internet, the only source of news was rumors. Homes, towns, families - all irrevocably, unrecognizably altered by the war. Even the agreement that in theory ended the war was so vague that many people don't even know what country controlled their village. And Russian maps shifted the borderlines almost nightly. The answers to questions were always and only more questions - What can we do? What have we done? What can be done? Where shall we go? Where can we stay? How can we stay? What is ours? What remains?
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Although she has spent the bulk of her career working in the Middle East, Scout Tufankjian is best known for her work documenting both of Barack Obama's presidential campaigns. Her book on the 2007-2008 campaign, Yes We Can: Barack Obama's History-Making Presidential Campaign was a New York Times and LA Times bestseller. Her second book, There is Only the Earth: Images from the Armenian Diaspora Project, is the culmination of six years documenting Armenian communities in over 20 different countries. More recently, she has worked for the HALO Trust in Nagorno-Karabakh and Angola, and has served as a temporary acting director of Committee to Protect Journalists's Emergency Response Team. She is a two-time TUMO Workshop leader, in Yerevan and Stepanakert, and continues to work as a freelance photographer and as a consultant for both RISC Training and Committee to Protect Journalists. While she still feels guilty about her extremely poor Armenian language skills, she has recently started taking classes again, and is using this bio to make sure she sticks to it.
www.scouttufankjian.com.
In September 2020, the autocratic state of Azerbaijan invaded the Republic of Artsakh and initiated a campaign of ethnic cleansing targeting its Indigenous Armenian population. With a vastly out-financed military and direct support from Turkey, Azerbaijan succeeded in occupying large swaths of Artsakh. In the process, thousands lost their lives and 100,000 Armenians were displaced from their ancestral homes.
The global Armenian diaspora was gripped by the collective trauma of watching a campaign of ethnic cleansing unfold via digital screens and televisual transmissions. As Indigenous Armenian heritage faced systematic destruction, a cadre of diasporan Armenian artists responded with projects that counter the attempted erasure of Armenian identities, histories, and cultural artifacts.
Glendale Library Arts & Culture and ReflectSpace Gallery present Sites of Fracture: Diasporic Imaginings of Occupied Artsakh, a virtual exhibition that brings together diasporan Armenian artists—from the United States, Canada, and Germany—to build collective counter-narratives to the forces of occupation and cultural erasure in the Republic of Artsakh.
Certain works in the exhibition emerged as campaigns calling for the recognition of Artsakh’s independence and right to self-determination; others document and index events in the region; others contemplate various past and current journeys through Artsakh; others performatively enact the histories of the Armenian liberation struggle. Each shares in common the recourse to aesthetic practice as a tactic for resisting the forces of cultural erasure.
Sites of Fracture gestures towards the repatriation of ancestral lands. The virtual exhibition takes place in the photographically reconstructed fortress of the city of Shushi—Artsakh’s historical cultural capital, now occupied by Azerbaijan. In the process, Sites of Fracture imagines decolonized futures for Shushi, envisioning an independent Republic of Artsakh wherein Indigenous communities exercise the right to self-governance and cultural autonomy.
Sites of Fracture: Diasporic Imaginings of Occupied Artsakh is part of the Glendale Library Arts & Culture’s Armenian Genocide Remembrance Month and “Be the Change” series which focuses on Inclusion – Diversity – Equity – Antiracism. “Be The Change” events build collective understanding of systemic racism, elevate the voices and stories of BIPOC, and inspire our community to be the change. “Be The Change” is sponsored by the City of Glendale, California Arts and Culture Commission, with funding from the City of Glendale Urban Art Fund.
Kamee Abrahamian
#RecognizeArtsakh Street Art Campaign
#RecognizeArtsakh is a widely-circulated guerilla street art and awareness campaign I launched on October 25th, 2020. Originally in collaboration with Karine Eurdekian (founder of @Kooyrigs), I designed posters for #RecognizeArtsakh and organized to have hundreds of them wheat-pasted across NYC and Brooklyn in over 75 locations. The poster points to a website where viewers can learn about the situation in Artsakh, donate to fundraising campaigns, and take actions toward advocacy. Within 24 hours, the campaign went viral and images of the campaign were shared virally across social media platforms. My inbox quickly became inundated by messages from individuals and groups who wanted to participate, so I made the poster available to download online and created a system to facilitate and support regional networking for further dissemination. Within two weeks of launching in NYC, the movement spread across major cities in the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Later on and in partnership with Mashinka Hakopian, Nancy Baker Cahill, and Nelli Sargsyan, we mounted an AR (augmented reality) project with a modified version of the poster entitled, "Monument to the Autonomous Republic of Artsakh'' on November 15, 2020 in Glendale, CA.
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Kamee is a supreme hyphenate who arrives in the world today as an interdisciplinary writer-artist-producer-performer-organizer and a non-binary, queer-feminist caregiver. They grew up in an immigrant suburb of Toronto and was born into an Armenian family displaced from the SWANA region. Kamee’s work is steeped with relational and generative practices oriented towards ancestral reclamation, visionary fiction, and diasporic futurism. They hold a BFA/BA in film and political science (Concordia University), an MA in expressive art therapy (European Graduate Institute), and a PhD (ABD) in community, liberation, indigenous and eco psychologies (Pacifica Graduate Institute). Kamee has published plays, literary and academic writing, while organizing and presenting films, artwork, staged performances and workshops internationally. Recent projects worth mention are Ensouled, Hok Danil, Transmission, and Dear Armen. They currently work both freelance and collaboratively with various collectives and ad-hoc groups, and they are the arts & creative expression tactic lead at a global feminist movement-support organization called AWID.
www.kameeabrahamian.com
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About the artist:
She Loves Collective
The Rifles Our Ancestors Didn’t Have, 2020-21
Performance documentation, 3D model
The Rifles Our Ancestors Didn’t Have aimed to raise awareness of the unprovoked aggression and destruction waged by Azerbaijan and its closest ally, Turkey, against the Armenian enclave of Artsakh, and to engage the global community, which remained mostly silent about these blatant attacks. It particularly aimed to raise awareness within the US — home to millions of Armenians, many of whom are descendents of survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. As the war continued, collective members staged two installments of TROADH, with the second incorporating fundraising for the families of soldiers who lost their lives in the war.
The first performance was modeled on a demonstration. It began with a silent protest in front of Los Angeles’s Broad Museum and made its way to the front of City Hall. On Sunday, October 11th, 2020 fifteen performers aligned the front of the museum in silence. As they arrived at Grand Park, traditionally Armenian rugs laid waiting for them — rug patterns representative of the “patterns” of generational trauma passed down for centuries. The rugs also gestured toward ancestors who were ripped from their homes and could only take what they could carry, and of the families doing the same over a hundred years later as they are forcibly removed from their homes. As they approached the steps of City Hall, they laid out the rugs once more and stood a final time in solidarity. To conclude, performers began to recreate rifles in various forms, some embroidering rifles to signify the threading of the past, present, and unknown future.
PERFORMERS (not in any specific order)
Ani Nina Oganyan
Ana Kostanian
Evleen Bakhtamian
Nelly Achkhen
Anet Abnous
Anaeis Ohanian
Adrineh Baghdassarian
Armineh Hovanessian
Leona Abrahamian
Mari Mansourian
Mariette Artine
Ani Grigorian
Nairi Bandari
Melanie Berberian
Rouzanna Berberian
Talar Baranian
Talin Olmessekian
Stepanouhi Uluhogian
Lernazang Ensemble
CREW
Jake Hakopian
Hilma Shahinan
Liana Grigoryan
Alireza Sabet
Jeff Markgraf
Martin Yorgantz
Henrik Mansourian
Sose Panossian
SPECIAL THANKS
Edwin Baranian
Tammy Postajian
Armen Gregorian
Helena Gregorian
Sandra Vartanian
Rita Baranian
Sarkis Vartanian
Mel Saroyan
Joseph Demerdjian
Hasmik Onany
Alco Printing
Froyboynik
Hratch Kozibeyokian
Mira Assadourian
Tamar Cj Simonian
Josh Gutter
Rene Babaian
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She Loves Collective is an alliance of women artists who share a strong belief in the power of creating social change through art. On October 11th, 2020 the collective launched a performance art piece entitled, The Rifles Our Ancestors Didn’t Have (TROADH) in response to the war that reignited on September 27, 2020 in the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh.
Sites of Fracture
Diasporic Imaginings of Occupied Artsakh
Artists: Kamee Abrahamian | Ali Cat/Entangled Roots Press | Silvina Der-Meguerditchian | Naré Mkrtchyan | Nelli Sargsyan | She Loves Collective | Scout Tufankjian | Anahid Yahjian | Yerazad Coalition
Curators: Mashinka Firunts Hakopian | Ara Oshagan | Anahid Oshagan
Naré Mkrtchyan
The Prayer, 2020
Single channel video with sound
1:52 mins
The road to Artsakh was beautiful but dangerous. I wanted to pretend it was not dangerous but in reality it was. The enemy, the Azerbaijani military, was literally right next to you at some points. The peacekeepers are scarce. The horror stories about civilians being stopped by the Azerbaijani soldiers and taken hostage are not exaggerations. Especially because I wanted to go to Tsitsernavank Monastery. The Armenian officials told me that they would not give me permission to travel to that region—it is dangerous, it’s off the main road, they told me. There are no peacekeepers there, they said. And I would arrive literally hours before it was occupied by the Azerbaijani forces, so the fact that Azeri soldiers could show-up while I was there was a very real possibility. It is an active conflict zone. Everything changes by the minute. My brain understood but my heart didn’t.
Throughout the Artsakh war, I was being triggered by the trauma of my ancestors. In a strange way, I felt like I was transported to 1915 when my ancestors in Western Armenia were losing their homes, their monasteries, their lives as the world watched in silence. But this time I thought I could be there, I could touch it for a second, I could hold on to it even if for a brief moment in eternity, I could reach for healing of this wound.
I booked my flight to travel from Los Angeles to Armenia and within 24 hours of arriving in Armenia, I was on my way to Artsakh to film Tsitsernavank, a 4th century monastery hours before it was going to be occupied by the Azeri forces. I was the only one there with my team. I touched the walls for all of us, I lit the candles for all of us, I knelt in front of the altar for all of us. I left the monastery 40 minutes before it was occupied and I knew that in that moment I was the last Armenian to be surrounded by those ethereal walls. While I filmed, somehow our prayer, Hayr Mer, slipped through my lips. An ancient vibration which has enveloped this monastery for so long arose... the magic of these words was whispered in hope, in suffering, in love and in despair... I prayed like never before. I prayed so those walls would feel one last time what they felt for centuries. In the middle of war, it was a whisper for protection. In the middle of darkness, it was a plea for strength to forgive. In the middle of destruction, it was a hope for new eternity. Among tanks, soldiers and the enemy steps away—I prayed. I prayed for love... for love is the prayer.
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Naré Mkrtchyan is a producer and director, known for The Other Side of Home (2016) which became the only Armenian Genocide film short listed for Oscar. Born in Armenia and raised in Los Angeles, her films combine American filmmaking technique and an international, independent spirit. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Film Production from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. She has written, directed and produced over 60 short films, her latest film being a Netflix Original. Her passion is telling unique human stories that connect people and move beyond the boundaries of nationality, gender, and religion.
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About the artist:
Nelli Sargsyan
Mountain Medley
Song/Sound
2:09 min
I weave songs of mountains and mountain breeze as a way of grounding myself in the mountains of my affective attachments. In these times of reactivated and ongoing trauma--as we worry about our POWs, mourn the deaths of so many, grieve for the displacement of so many, grieve for our threatened (lost?) sovereignty--the vibrations of these soundscapes--as reassembled, rewoven, resewn, repatched fragments--make life momentarily more livable, untethered. I set the mountains and mountain breeze free through my breath. The mountains and mountain breeze set me free through my breath. The return, always immediately available, too, is in/with a breath.
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Nelli Sargsyan is an associate professor of anthropology at Emerson College, Boston, MA. As a feminist, Sargsyan situates herself at the disciplinary intersections of political anthropology, queer studies, and critical race studies, among others. In her scholarly-poetic work and teaching Sargsyan is interested in stretching disciplinary and genre boundaries to explore the multi-sensory possibilities of feminist world-making. Most recently she has been interested in political work that cultivates feminist consciousness and collective care, whether it be through direct street action, public performance, or feminist fabulation. Sargsyan’s work has appeared in academic journals such as Feminist Formations, History and Anthropology, and Feminist Anthropology, as well as on online platforms such as ARTMargins, Public Seminar, and Socioscope.
Anahid Yahjian
Hishé (Remember), 2021
Single channel video with sound
5:53 min
Hishé is a meditation on alienation, confusion, grief and the burden of remembering. These four elements frame my relationship with the Nagorno-Karabakh region now more than ever. As an American with Western Armenian ancestry, I have never quite been able to claim neither ownership over nor full understanding of that "black garden" and its mind-bending history, yet I have nevertheless felt completely spellbound when walking amongst its silent ruins and dark, lush trees. Like a gap in the space-time continuum, this "no-man's land," as I once described it to the uninitiated, is a place where I have often gone and felt myself start to disappear. Now, as I reckon with possibly never being able to return to it within my mortal lifetime, I am drowning under the weight of making sure I never forget it. This film is an attempt to capture this process, and is comprised of footage and photographs that I and others like me have accumulated in the last 10-12 years of areas in the region where we are no longer permitted to go and ask our questions.
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Anahid Yahjian is an independent writer, director and producer of experimental, documentary and narrative cinema. Her commitment to telling true stories (even if they come from her imagination) was shaped by an early love for visual storytelling that was formalized in college and took flight during her coming of age in Armenia. There, she produced the internationally-awarded narrative short 140 Drams (Camerimage, Clermont-Ferrand 2013), laid the creative groundwork for the feature documentary Spiral (IDFA Bertha Fund 2015, Golden Apricot 2017) and shot and directed the viral digital documentary LEVON: A Wondrous Life (2013). Since returning to her native Los Angeles, she shot and directed the experimental cine-triptych, Corpus Callosum (2014-2016) and directed the narrative science-fiction short Transmission (BFI Flare, Vancouver QFF 2019). When not creating her own work, she directs branded content and music videos. She splits her time between Yerevan, Sofia (her birthplace), Los Angeles (her home), and New York City.
www.anahidyahjian.com
Silvina Der-Meguerditchian
Waiting for friendship, 2020
Single channel video with sound
34 min
This film was made in October 2020. After Azerbaijan, backed by Turkey attacked Nagorno Karabagh, a young republic inhabited by over 90 % of Armenian indigenous population, but not yet recognized internationally, I decided to re-edit material I had collected over the last 13 years. Parallel to the unequal war on the front there was a similar war in the media in which two denialist dictatorships used large amounts of money to distort facts.
This film was made to circulate in social media and aimed to raise awareness of the real situation that the people of Karabagh and the Armenian nation are living through.
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Silvina Der-Meguerditchian was born in Buenos Aires in 1967. She lives and works in Berlin. Her work explores themes of belonging, the role of minorities in society, and the potential of an "in-between" space. Memory and working with archives are the focus of her artistic exploration. In the last ten years, she has increasingly realized projects in Istanbul and successful collaborations with Ballhausnaunynstrasse Theater, Maxim Gorki Theater (Berlin) and Anadolu Culture Foundation (Istanbul). Her work is represented in international private and public collections. She is the artistic director of the Houshamadyan project, a multimedia memory book for Armenian Ottoman history (www.houshamadyan.org). Silvina Der-Meguerditchian was a fellow at the Tarabya Academy of Culture in 2014/15. In the summer of 2015, she participated in Armenity, the Armenian pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, which was awarded the Golden Lion for the best national representation. In the fall of 2015, she curated the exhibition "ENKEL, new geographies of belonging" in Istanbul. In 2018, she participated in "Hello World" Revision of a Collection." a critical examination of the National Gallery's collection and its predominantly Western orientation at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Since 2014, she has worked with "Women mobilizing memory," a group of artists, writers, museologists, social activists, and memory and memorial scholars working internationally. In 2020, her film "The Wishing Tree" was awarded with a Special Mention at the Sharjah Film Platform. Her first personal catalog with VFMK (Verlag für Moderne Kunst) has just been published in January 2021.
Yerazad Coalition
Multi-channel video with sound
Images of Crossing // Հատման Պատկերներ (Hutmun Patkerner)
This project seeks to center frontlined people in the Armenian community, inviting them to share their experiences in the community, in particular during the genocidal attacks of the last nine and counting months. Throughout the diaspora, marginalized voices routinely experience intersecting oppressions at the hands of other Armenians. For being LGBTQIA+. For being Black. For being mixed. For disabilities. For any of the thousands of other layers that make up the violence those with intersectional identities often experience. And yet so many continually fight to stay connected to our identities, for our culture and our people.
Joel Mardirossian
they/them
Queer, mixed, Trans-nonbinary, autistic and bi-polar person.
Nura Kinge
she/her
My intersections within the Armenian community are that I am mixed race, multi-ethnic, and I was raised Muslim.
Carene Rose Mekertichyan
she/her
I am a Black and Armenian Woman.
Alina Shafikova
she/her
Mixed ethnicity (Armenian/Tatar), Jewish.
Narineh Seferian
she/her
Armenian living in Chicago, IL, USA. I am half Armenian, half American.
Hagop Najarian
he/him
LGBTQIA+.
Sophia Bobadilla
she/her
Multiethnic.
Armen Hovhannes
they/them
Gender non-binary, disabled, poor, formerly homeless, senior.
Joy Weisel
she/her
Mixed Armenian-American living with a disability.
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Yerazad // Երազատ
Dedicated to Armenian liberation and building transnational solidarity. We uplift ALL Armenians - mixed race, LGBTQIA2S, undocumented.
Sites of Fracture: Diasporic Imaginings of Occupied Artsakh is installed virtually in the photographically re-constructed fortress of Shushi: Artsakh’s historical cultural capital, now occupied by Azerbaijan.
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