The Aghed and its Displacement Paths as Collecting Practices:
From Marzovan to Fresno
2023
Soul Consoling Tower in the Simonian Farm, Fresno, California, 2019. Photographer and ©: Marianna Hovhannisyan.
This essay explores the museological and archival afterlives of Armenians’ erasures and diasporic displacements from their ancestral homeland as a result of the Ottoman Empire’s 1915 Genocide against Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks. I first examine the role of archives and collections at the immediate aftermath of the Genocide through my curatorial exhibition Empty Fields (commissioned by SALT, Istanbul, 2016). The exhibition design by artist Fareed Armaly exposed the archival instabilities evident at the level of empty data fields and served as the markers of irretrievable histories, that now remain as the only contemporary narratives to follow. I further explore this idea of a narrative by connecting the Empty Fields with the scattered Armenian diasporic archives/collections in Fresno, California, the traditional homelands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples, among other Indigenous peoples. This city is not only the site of the largest Armenian diaspora in the US, the first generation of the survivors settled there were also from Marzvan. While my research (2019) in Fresno showed that there is no collective diasporic memory about Marzvan (as the place of the origin and homeland), there are instead new articulations of collecting practices. The existing Armenian scattered collections overlap with other displaced identities, such as Japanese Americans. By engaging with the concepts of “critical fabulation” (Saidiya Hartman), “imagining the impossible records” (Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell), and the role of Traditional Knowledge Systems (Maria Montenegro), I argue how the archival gaps created by the catastrophe can expose the broken links between the displacement and diasporic becomings, but also endorse new collecting imaginaries through the overlaps with other displaced identities.
Displaced, Un-placed, Re-placed:
Armenian Archives and Archival Imaginaries in the US
Co-author: Anne J. Gilliland
2022
Cover of the Genocide survivor and filmmaker Michael Hagopian’s film, Strangers in a Promised Land about the Armenians in Fresno, 1984 Copyright: Berge Bulbulian Archives © Henry Madden Library, Fresno.
Drawing upon the multilayered experience of the Armenian community in the US following the Armenian Genocide, this chapter proposes approaching the concept of displaced archives in terms of the affect and materiality of collections, particularly of photographs, that have been preserved by families across generations in the diaspora. It argues that such displaced family archives transmute after displacement into an affective and visual experience — an archival imaginary — that reminds community members today, and subsequent generations, of what is lost, irretrievable or unknown. It also introduces the archaeological concept of “negative evidence” to underscore the evidentiary importance of archival voids relating to Genocide and displacement. In concluding, it proposes actions that could be taken by the archival field, in addition to ongoing scholarly, legal and policy work, to elevate the evidentiary importance of voids in archival collections and knowledge, to uncover additional knowledge of what happened during and after the Genocide, and to render at least some “impossible archival imaginaries” possible. Read This Text Here.
Gilliland Anne, and Hovhannisyan, Marianna. “Displaced, Un-placed, Re-placed: Armenian Archives and Archival Imaginaries in the US.” In James Lowry, ed., Disputed Archival Heritage (London: Routledge, 2022), 233-261.
Speculative Classification: Tracing a Disputed Portrait Between
The Archives of Malvina Hoffman and Sergey Merkurov
2019
Sergey Merkurov, Khrimyan Hayrik
(the first death mask), plaster cast, 1907, Sergey Merkurov Museum, Gyumri, Armenia. © Sergey Merkurov’s House Museum.
This paper presents a case study that illustrates how porous the bond is between two different epistemological regimes: the emphasis that is placed on visuality in art historical collections, and the act of labeling by the archive. I will touch upon collections representing two sculptors, Malvina Hoffman (1885–1966) and Sergey Merkurov (1881–1952), who both passed through the studio of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). In this case the slippage is the assigning of an incorrect or at least misleading keyword or ‘tag’ of one portrait in Hoffman’s archives at the Special Collections of the Getty Research Institute. Intended as part of The Races of Mankind project, in the archive the portrait is titled “Armenian Jew.” That initial title, as well as the current archival description and the lineage invoked through the title, have all been left open and in dispute. As such, the unresolved status of this portrait emerges as an anomaly in Hoffman’s archive that tests the limits of her logic of physiognomy and facial character. My research shows that due to this mistag, the portrait has a direct reference to a completely different work of Hoffman. This invites in turn another reading that sees a provocative physiognomic resemblance with Merkurov’s first death mask. Read This Text Here.
Hovhannisyan, Marianna. “Speculative classification: Tracing a disputed portrait between the archives of Malvina Hoffman and Sergey Merkurov.” InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 15, no. 2, 2019.
A Book Review
2018
3rd Floor, Happening: Hail to the Union
of Artists from the Netherworld. Performance at the Artists’ Union, 1988. Source: The Political Aesthetics
of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the ‘Painterly Real’, 1987-2004. Published with the permission of Angela Harutyunyan.
The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the ‘Painterly Real,’ 1987–2004 is by Angela Harutyunyan, art historian and associate professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Art History at the American University of Beirut. The book introduces Harutyunyan’s ongoing contribution to the body of work in art history and criticism which aims to historicize the advent of contemporary art in Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.Based on her decade-long archival research and fieldwork, this is the first English-language attempt at a cohesive art historical account of Armenian contemporary art. Methodologically, Harutyunyan has taken on an ambitious task: “to eject the subjectivity of the author from the historical narration, to un-remember a decade formative for my [her] generation, in order to re-remember it as history.” Read This Text Here.
Hovhannisyan, Marianna. “Book Review: Angela Harutyunyan, The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the ‘Painterly Real,’ 1987–2004.” FIELD 10 (Spring, 2018).
Empty Fields Exhibition E-pub
2018
Tulipa brachyanthera Freyn. nov. spec.
Manissadjian. Plantae orientales, No. 1151 Amassia, Galatia Determ. J.Freyn, received on July 29, 1896.© Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle–Paris, Herbier National.
This e-publication brings together visual and textual materials associated with the exhibition Empty Fields, curated by Marianna Hovhannisyan in 2016 (April 6–June 5) at SALT Galata, İstanbul. Empty Fields is the first exhibition to explore the archive of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. The project is made possible through the partnership of SALT—which has been cataloging and digitizing the archive—and the American Research Institute in Turkey (ARIT), the archive’s caretaker and owner. This vast repository contains materials about Protestant mission work in the Ottoman Empire and its further development in Turkey. The exhibition reflects on the contemporary agency of the available content by uncovering the dispersed natural science collection at the mission-led Museum of Anatolia College and forgotten legacy of its curator, Armenian-German scientist Prof. Johannes “John” Jacob Manissadjian.
Commissioned authors: Hrach Bayadyan, Beverley Butler, Hans-Lukas Kieser, Özgür Sevgi Göral, Nazan Maksudyan, Armen T. Marsoobian, Marc Nichanian, and Zeynep Türkyılmaz.
On Empty Fields
2016
Installation view: “Narrating the Museological Space of Empty Fields” section. Exhibition design: Fareed Armaly. Photo: Mustafa Hazneci. Empty Fields, SALT Galata, Istanbul, 2016.
Archive-Practice curatorial project
2008—15
The seal of EX-VOTO, the first private gallery in Yerevan. Contributor of the artifact: art historian, founder of the gallery, Nazareth Karoyan, 2009.
Hovhannisyan, Marianna. “Archive-Practice.” Qalqalah 2 (Winter, 2016).Paris: Bétonsalon – Center for Art and Research Kadist Art Foundation.
Dog Ta(i)les
2014
Dog Ta(i)les is a speculative writing rendering a specific nonhuman perspective by taking hold of an artefact, a stray dog’s tail, that designates belonging to a non-human state. It views the subject of “everybody” by its component form, “every–body,” set in an urban condition. Dog Ta(i)les questions whether the universal assumed “everybody” within Andy Merrifield’s revolutionary vision and critique of neoliberal citizenship limits the framework and excludes “the potential outsider other” of whom the urban condition also relates. The body-text is created as body–less writing by mapping “tails” from different bodies of research—encounters with theoretical texts and arguments—that acknowledge the straying points of the “other” in the discourse of “everybody.”
Hovhannisyan, Marianna. “Dog Ta(i)les.” Here Comes Everybody. London: Goldsmiths, University of London. 2014. Project publication.