Language, Symbolism, and Unsettling Acts of De-Erasure
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In Praise of a High Shadow
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Sunday. December 8. 2024. 4-6pm.
Toronto, Canada. Private home. By invitation.
Organized and hosted by Lara Arabian, Jadi Darawi.
VIDEO ARTISTS:
Palestinian video artists (Programme 2)
Armenian video artists
ABOUT:
Creative Action Coalition (CAC) is proud to present video art by Palestinian and Armenian artists in multidisciplinary events dedicated to the collective liberation of Palestine and Artsakh (a.k.a. Nagorno-Karabakh), and to acknowledging the continued genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and Armenians.
The Palestinian portion of the program is part of the “In Praise of a High Shadow” video art collection, organized by Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques, in partnership with the A.M. Qattan Foundation, for the 8th /si:n/ biennial س , a program that was born in Palestine in 2009. The organizers continue their work by presenting video art by Palestinians and international artists in solidarity at various international venues, including the 37 Festival Les Instants Vidéo in Marseille, France. CAC is happy to help amplify Palestinian voices by presenting some of these works. In addition, CAC will present “Language, Symbolism, and Unsettling Acts of De-Erasure”, featuring video art, poetry, and other work by Armenian artists.
As the West arms and rewards Israel and its close military, strategic, and economic ally, the petro-dictatorship of Azerbaijan, CAC’s hope is to educate and inform about systemic oppressions by invasive imperialist and colonial societies that feed on the bones and ashes of indigenous communities, claiming, and devouring the fruits of their labor and creativity.
Less than a month following the blockade and ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, having assisted Azerbaijan, tested its weapons on Armenians, and learned and become emboldened from the silence of the international communities and “progressive” journalists, Israel launched a similar blockade on the 2.2 million Palestinians of Gaza. Previously known as the largest open-air prison, with an already deprived population, Gaza is now a 141 square miles of pulverized extermination camp of innocent civilians and starving, disabled, and diseased children.
Armenians and Palestinians have had a shared history of tragedy and oppression, and their creative work and cultural heritage continue to be plundered and destroyed. Many Armenians who were given shelter in Palestine during the 1915 Genocide, were driven out of their homes during the 1948 Nakba, alongside their Palestinian friends and neighbors. The world has repeatedly failed and continues to fail both Armenians and Palestinians. Creative Action Coalition is committed to serving both communities, and other oppressed and colonized nations.
These events may include discussions, poetry readings, performance art, etc. They will take place in venues such as private homes, alternative arts spaces, and traditional arts venues.
Language, Symbolism, and
Unsettling Acts of De-Erasure
organized by Creative Action Coalition
in collaboration with local artist organizers
curated by Alysse Stepanian
creativeactioncoalition.com
This global-scale arts initiative by Creative Action Coalition (CAC) addresses the struggles of indigenous communities and the appropriation and destruction of their cultural heritage and history, worldwide.
Two years after the 44-day war on Artsakh, in December 2022, aided by Israel, Turkey, and others, Azerbaijan blockaded Artsakh and continued the siege for over 9 months, depriving the 120 thousand residents of gas, electricity, food, clean water, medicine, and basic survival needs. A long report issued by the former International Criminal Court prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, warned that what was happening was considered genocide. In September 2023 the blockade ended with aerial bombardments, kidnappings, torture, and complete ethnic cleansing of the Indigenous Armenians who had thousands of years of presence and important historic cultural ties to the region. In July 2024, alarmed by the prospect of Azerbaijan hosting COP29, the youth-driven environmental movement, Fridays for Future, stated, “Fossil fuels make up over 90% of Azerbaijan’s exports. Around 40% of Israel’s oil is imported from Azerbaijan, fueling war machines against Palestinians. In return, Azerbaijan receives 70% of its weapons from Israel for use against Armenians”. These events are the continuation of the Armenian and Palestinian genocides, as they were never fully acknowledged the first time that they occurred.
8th /si:n/ biennial س
In Praise of a High Shadow
Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques
in partnership with the A.M. Qattan Foundation
instantsvideo.com
Based on a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, written in 1982 during the siege of Beirut, a poem written after the Sabra and Shatila massacre, read in Algeria in 1983 before the Palestinian National Council.
In 2024, the 8th /si:n/ biennial is in exile. It will be sheltered by Festival Les Instants Vidéo.
The Biennial refuses to remain silent, or to be silenced. Nor will it abandon the territory where it was born. It will make a stopover in Ramallah.
The Biennial will not leave the stage. ACTION ! Let the images flow. Let the pictures speak for themselves.
The biennial will be written in the same way as a film, through editing. The images will invite spectators to get in motion to discover other territories. They will offer forms and spaces of resistance to erasure and invisibility.
What if we were to imagine a cloud museum (Sahab project), to reflect on the question of the trace, as a gesture of resistance to oblivion and dislocation, or even as the writing of one’s own history, a history that is also written in the future tense.
And for a poetics of relation, we will cultivate the power of light towards artistic and cultural solidarity in the slightest spaces of the biennale.
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Inspired by the tri-continental, anti-imperialist solidarity movements of the 1960s and 80s (See Past Disquiet exhibition curated by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti), at the crossroads of militant, artistic and museological practices that created a very particular form of museum of solidarity, without walls, and more often than not, museums in exile (in support of the people of Chile, Nicaragua, South Africa and of course Palestine), we launched a call for solidarity to the artists we have had the pleasure of meeting along the way, as well as a call to Palestinian artists.
The biennale will take place on October, 20, 2024 in Marseille Friche la Belle de Mai, made of programs by artists from Palestine and international artists, and exchanges (a panel). It will also make stops elsewhere in the world, in organisations that wish to host part or all of the program. More information here…
ARMENIAN VIDEO ARTISTS:
Anna Grigorian — Armenia/Canada
Alysse Stepanian — USA
Ara Oshagan (& Micheline Aharonian Marcom ) — USA
Anahid Yahjian — USA
Voices of Artsakh with Mikael (Misha) Grigoryan — Armenia (Artsakh)
Also featuring poetry by Zaven Ovian (USA) with readings by Lara Arabian (Canada) and Jadi Darawi (Canada).
*Anna Grigorian
Armenia/Canada
annagrigorian.art
Instagram: @annagrigorian.blue.hugs
Anna Grigorian is an artist and filmmaker from Armenia, whose art practice is currently based between Canada and Armenia. With a background in sculpture, literature, and photography, her current chosen medium is moving image. Through mixing elements of theater, early cinema, and constructed surreal environments, her films revolve around socio political and economic problems, and examination of power relations.
Video Title: Silence IV (Լռության կաթիլային)
2023. 02:00 mins. color. sound. Armenia/Canada
Production, camera, concept, montage, sound design, video editing: Anna Grigorian
***
կաթ-կաթ
պատերին նստած
լռություն
Աննա Գրիգորյան
***
silence
drop by drop
sitting on the walls
“Silence IV” (Լռության կաթիլային) was created in April, 2023, during the nine-month blockade of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh). Between the alarming and scary news coming from home, and the calm reality of every-day life abroad, the artist is trying to make sense of the two realities through art. Playing with lights on interior surfaces the artist is working through the conflicts between her immediate surroundings and split identity.
*Alysse Stepanian
Pomo land, Turtle Island (USA)
alyssestepanian.com
Instagram: @alyssestepanian
Alysse is an Armenian-American, Iranian-born cross-media artist, independent curator, human and “animal” rights advocate, and Organizer of Creative Action Coalition. Her creative work, research and writings are focused on the effects of nationalism and politics of fear, and the importance of intersectionality in fighting injustices.
Stepanian has exhibited widely, and has lectured about interconnected oppressions for her co-curated exhibition of video art by 20 Iranian women, “Nietzsche Was A Man”, at the Pori Art Museum (Finland), Malmö Konsthall (Sweden), and Museo Ex Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico City). In 2018 her collaborative multimedia performance, #MemoryoftheUniverse | Bayesian Poisoning, was presented at the Instants Vidéo Numériques et Poétiques Festival in Marseille. As the BOX 1035 duo, she has created collaborative installations during residencies at Kunsthaus Tacheles/Berlin, Imagine Gallery/Beijing, and Islip Art Museum/New York.
Video Title: Ayb-Ben Այբ−Բեն
video art in collaboration with generative AI
2024. 06:05 mins. color. stereo
music. video. text. voice. performance: Alysse Stepanian
music producer: Philip Mantione
words and alphabet in Armenian, Persian, English
I live in the US, a home away from home away from home. My Armenian ancestry has not been traced beyond my great grandparents in Iran. This is a story commonly shared by those who have been forcefully displaced from their native homelands.
In this work, I embrace the digital aberrations and artifacts produced by AI technology to communicate the break-down of meaning in a world that is openly ruled by tyrants and war-profiteers. The recognition of the interconnectedness of the global struggles against oppressors and the necessity of solidarities are symbolized by the fusion of the Armenian forget-me-not flowers and Palestinian poppies. Cogs in the machine that morph into beautiful and magical flowers represent the power and potential in all of us to radically and poetically re-imagine the world and instigate change.
*Ara Oshagan & Micheline Aharonian Marcom (USA)
araoshagan.net
michelinemarcom.com
Instagram: @ara.oshagan
Ara Oshagan is a diasporic multi-disciplinary artist and curator whose practice explores collective and personal histories of dispossession, legacies of violence, identity and (un)imagined futures. Oshagan works in photography, collage, installation, film, book arts, public art and monuments and has published four books of photography. He has presented his work at the Annenberg Space for Photography, International Center of Photography in NY and TedX Yerevan and has had solo exhibitions in LA, New York, Boston, Armenia, Morocco, and South Korea. Oshagan is an Artist-in-Residence at the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica and a curator at the City of Glendale ReflectSpace Gallery.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom has published eight books, including a trilogy of novels about the Armenian Genocide and its aftermath. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the US Artists’ Foundation. Her novels have been a New York Times Notable Book and won the PEN/USA Award for Fiction. She is Director and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.
Oshagan and Marcom are collaborating on a multi-year, multimedia work, What Can I Tell You, We Lost Everything, that considers the aftermath of the displacement of Armenians from Artsakh.
Video Title: What Can I Say, We Lost Everything
2024. Three-channel video. 05:41 mins. color. sound
Ara Oshagan: video and editing, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Micheline Aharonian Marcom: texts, Charlottsville, VA, USA
Gulbenkian Armenian Communities Grant, American University of Armenia
“What Can I Say, We Lost Everything” is a layered, palimpsestic, and multi-dimensional work of reckoning. Ara Oshagan and Micheline Marcom Aharonian, two Armenian diasporan artists—a novelist and a visual artist—collaborate on a project to explore and consider the afterlives of the recent violent displacement of over 100,000 indigenous Armenians from the Karabagh/Artsakh region of the Armenian highlands. Their own histories of displacement and inherited memory are entangled in the construction of this deeply personal as well as collective narrative. This three-channel video is one part of this larger project that encompasses photography, film, oral history, literature, archives, reflections, and photos and video by the displaced communities themselves.
*Anahid Yahjian (USA)
anahidyahjian.com
Instagram: @medullacreative
Anahid Yahjian is an independent writer, director and producer of experimental, documentary and narrative cinema. Her work is driven by questioning and pursuit: of history, of power, of memory, of liminality, of the surreal and the sublime.
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 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). She was later commissioned by the City of Glendale’s ReflectSpace gallery to create the docu-memoir Hishé (2021). When not creating her own work, she directs branded content and music videos for clients such as AMC Networks, Amazon Music and Joyful Noise Recordings. Recently, she also supervised post production on televised series and digital content for A24, Netflix, Vice and Spotify.
A citizen of the world, she is fluent in English, Armenian and Bulgarian and can get by in Spanish and Russian. She splits her time between Yerevan, Sofia (her birthplace), Los Angeles (her home), and New York City.
Video Title: Hishé (Remember)
2021. 05:53 mins. color. sound.
A film by Anahid Yahjian
Edited by Armen Harootun
Sound mix by Armen Bazarian
Additional footage and images courtesy of Drew Loizeaux and Emily Mkrtichian
With thanks to Ben Schwab
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. While the film does reckon with post-2020 war realities, it does so by revisiting footage and memories from the decade preceding it. The structure, if mapped, takes us on a journey to southern Armenia, into NKR, and back out—for the last time.
*Voices of Artsakh with Mikael (Misha) Grigoryan
Armenia (Artsakh)
artsakhvoices.com
Instagram: @artsakhvoices
Voices of Artsakh is a cultural ensemble that has captivated audiences globally with its heartfelt performances and dedication to preserving Armenian traditions. Representing the resilience and rich heritage of Artsakh, the group combines folklore, modern artistry, and authentic dialect to deliver a powerful cultural experience.
Our ensemble has toured extensively, performing in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond, showcasing the beauty of Armenian music and dance to diverse audiences. Voices of Artsakh has nurtured young talents who have gone on to represent Armenia on international stages, including “The Voice,” “Eurovision,” and “New Wave.”
In these challenging times, we see it as our mission to bring the unyielding spirit of Artsakh to Armenians worldwide. Through our performances, we aim to inspire pride in Armenian identity while sharing the beauty of our culture with the world. We are honored to collaborate with organizations that share our vision of connecting Armenians through art and music, creating unforgettable experiences for communities far and wide.
Mikael Grigoryan, also known as Misha, is a 16-year-old Armenian singer with 12 years of experience in music. He has been a member Voices of Artsakh since the age of 4, actively contributing to its mission of preserving Armenian culture and heritage. Misha has participated in and excelled at numerous prestigious competitions. He writes original music, creates arrangements, and handles mixing and mastering for his songs, showcasing his versatility and dedication to his craft.
Video Title: Misha – Poqrik Kharabakhtsi
2015, 4:04 mins. color. sound
Produced by Voices of Artsakh
Producer: Lira Kocharyan
Music: Arthur Grigoryan
Lyrics: Grigor Kyokchan
Music Producer: KarenSevak Production
Mix Engineer: Armen Toroyan
Director: Aren Bayadyan
Director of Photography: Artyom Abovyan
Editor: Karen Melkumyan
The song Poqrik Harabakhtsi tells the story of a young boy from Artsakh who, despite the hardships of life, is in love and eagerly awaits a meeting with his beloved. The song and its music video symbolize the resilience and struggle of the people of Artsakh. This fight involved everyone—from children and women who spent much of their lives in basements to the men who defended our homeland and ensured its safety.
The song reflects the unwavering spirit of the people of Artsakh, who, despite all challenges, continued and still continue to pursue goodness, light, and hope, finding beauty even in the most difficult times.