This workshop is free to attend and all sessions will take place online, hosted by Dialogues without borders.

It is possible to attend individual sessions or commit to the whole workshop. Please use the registration form to indicate which sessions you hope to attend.

On Monday 14 April, we will send out Zoom links to those who have pre-registered. If you register after that date, we aim to provide you with access in due course.

Please note that these sessions will be recorded for documentation and future reference. If you prefer, you may turn off your camera.

Mirroring Lives is based on conversations among three women whose shared feminist, anti-racist, anti-militarist politics brought them together across the deep divide shaped by the genocide of Ottoman Armenians in 1915–1916 and its ongoing denial in Turkey. Coming together around the shared understanding of “the personal is political” and a critical feminist intersectional approach, the authors have engaged in deeply interactive conversations that focus on the gendered, racialized, and heteronormative aspects of the genocidal process and its ongoing afterlives. In this session, they will read selections from their book manuscript and reflect on their journey of sharing pain, vulnerability, and mourning as well as joy; embarking on personal/political journeys together, as well as co-witnessing and co-resisting in moments of political struggle. 

*Simultaneous interpretation will be available

Ayşe Gül Altınay is the Founding Chair of EarthSky Solidarity Association based in Istanbul, Ayşe Gül recently left Sabancı University where she taught anthropology and gender studies for 23.5 years, co-creating, among others, SU Gender, Sexual Harassment Policy, Gender Equality Action Plan, Purple Certificate (training teachers in feminist pedagogy), Curious Steps (mobilizing marginalized memories through feminist/queer city walks), Transformative Activism (2017-2024), Dicle Koğacıoğlu Article Award, Şirin Tekeli Research Award, and Hrant Dink Memorial Workshops (2009-2015).

Since 2008, she has been volunteering at the Hrant Dink Foundation, contributing particularly to the 23.5 Hrant Dink Site of Memory. Recipient of the Duygu Asena Award from PEN Türkiye (2008, with Yeşim Arat), Prof Üstün Ergüder Research Award from Boğaziçi University (2019) and Few-Glasson Alumni Society Award from Duke University, Ayşe Gül has published extensively at the intersections of militarism, war, genocide and gender, including: The Grandchildren: The Hidden Legacy of “Lost” Armenians in Turkey (with Fethiye Çetin, trans. Maureen Freely, 2014), Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence (edited with Andrea Petö, 2016), Women Mobilizing Memory (edited with Maria Jose Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca and Alisa Solomon, 2019), and “Undoing Academic Cultures of Militarism: Turkey and Beyond” (Current Anthropology, 2019).

Ayşe Gül’s recent work focuses on transformative activism and feminist/queer re-imaginings of life and ecology. Since 2003, she has also been the co-host of a feminist-queer radio program titled Hikayenin Her Hali (All Sides of the Story) on Açık Radyo. Through her teaching, research and activism, Ayşe Gül is passionate about opening co-creative spaces that weave personal, collective and planetary journeys of reckoning, healing and transformation.

Professor Emeritus Arlene Voski Avakian is a founder and former Chair of the Department of Women, Gender, Sexuality at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her books include:  Lion Woman’s Legacy: An Armenian American Memoir (1992), Turkish translation Aras press, Istanbul, Spring 2020; Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meaning of Food and Cooking (1997, 2005); From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (co-editor), African American Women and the Vote 1837-1965 (1997) (co-editor). 

She is currently working with Ayse Gul Altinay and Fethiye Cetin on a book of conversations among them exploring race/ethnicity, gender, and class. Avakian is currently working with Movement Voter Project, an organization that funds progressive grassroots groups in marginalized communities in the U.S., building progressive community infrastructure and getting out the vote. 

Fethiye Cetin was born in the Maden district of Elazığ. She completed her primary and secondary education in Maden, Mahmudiye, and Elazığ. She graduated from the Faculty of Law at Ankara University. She worked on Human Rights Law, especially focusing on minority rights. Fethiye Çetin, who was awarded the Padova Righteousness plaque for her integrity, justice, and honesty, and is an honorary member of the French Armenian Lawyers Association, was Hrant Dink’s lawyer. After his assassination, she represented the Dink family, Agos Newspaper, and the Hrant Dink Foundation.

She is the author of the books "My Grandmother" (Metis, 2004), "Grandchildren" with Ayşe Gül Altınay (Metis, 2009), "I Am Ashamed! The Trial of the Hrant Dink Murder" (Metis, 2013), and "Poetry in the Prison-Slivers of Memories" (İletişim, 2024).

Sarkis Zabunyan, one of the prominent figures in Turkish contemporary art, was selected to represent the Turkish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Since 2015 was the centennial of the Armenian Genocide, a genocide that has not been recognized by the Turkish Republic for more than a hundred years, and Sarkis being an Istanbul Armenian born and raised in Turkey, the selection caused quite a stir and sparked a public discussion on art and collective healing when it was announced. As a result, the catalog of Sarkis’s work Respiro was subjected to censorship.

Through this censorship case, this talk scrutinizes various reconciliation discourses developed in Turkey in the early 2000s regarding the Armenian Genocide and how contemporary art could possibly engage/disengage with those discourses.

Nora Tataryan completed her PhD degree at the Women & Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto as a Connaught Scholar,  her Master’s degree in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University (Istanbul) and her Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at Galatasaray University (Istanbul) and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. In 2022, she participated to the Turkish-Armenian Relations research project hosted by University of Cambridge Interfaith Programme as a Visiting Scholar. In her doctoral dissertation “ Lingering Between Fiction and Reality: An Aesthetic Approach to the Legacy of Catastrophe in Turkey” Tataryan worked on the theoretical openings of approaching state violence through the possibilities of art and fiction.

Having presented her research internationally and published her work in academic and non-academic journals and books, Tataryan’s research interests include aesthetics, collective memory, genocide studies, feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis. Besides her academic expertise, Tataryan worked as a researcher in art institutions such as Arter and Salt and collaborated with Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts for the 15th and 16th Istanbul Biennale. Having published blog entries, fiction, literary and art critics through various media Tataryan also worked as a managing editor in the journal “Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience” between 2018-2020.

In this panel, three artists in different mediums (poetry/spoken word, music/sound, animation/drawing) describe their collaborative process in the making of An Armenian Triptych: Retracing Our Steps, a short film released in 2021 that was recognized in several film festivals in North America. Reflecting upon the continued denial of their grandfathers' experiences during the Armenian Genocide, the film's creation involved a non-hierarchical and unique approach in both form and content that highlights the power of remembrance in the architecture of how art is conceived and made.

Alan Semerdjian is an award-winning Armenian-American writer, musician, educator, and current poet laureate of New York's Nassau County. Recent recognitions include two Pushcart Prize nominations; a Frontier New Poets Award; poems in Poetry International, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hanging Loose, and Mizna; and a tweet from Kim Kardashian that made his 2020 spoken word album The Serpent and The Crane (with guitarist/composer Aram Bajakian) viral for a day. Alan's poem "The Writing About It Again" was part of a short, animated film (An Armenian Triptych: Retracing Our Steps, made in collaboration with Bajakian and international visual artist Kevork Mourad) that won honors in several film festivals. Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Balakian has called his first full-length poetry collection, In the Architecture of Bone (GenPop Books, 2009), “well worth your reading.”

Alan has been teaching English in public schools for over twenty five years winning awards for his commitment to education while recording, releasing, and touring in support of several critically-acclaimed collections of music across a range of genres. He is on the advisory board for the International Armenian Literary Alliance, through which he founded and directs the Young Armenian Poets Awards.

Kevork Mourad was born in Kameshli Syria, received his degree from the Yerevan institute of Fine Art, and now lives in New York. A painter and video artist, he has had his animated and live visuals performed around the world--at the Spoleto Festival in SC (2022), Korea National Opera in Seoul (2020), National Cathedral in DC (2020), Dutch Royal Palace for the Prince Claus Foundation (2016), Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC (2018, 2012, 2010), Aga Khan Museum in Toronto (2018), Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA (2018), ElbPhilharmonie in Hamburg (2017), and MuCEM in Marseille (2015, 2013), among many others. His work is in the permanent collection of Paris's Institut du Monde Arabe, the Spurlock Museum, and his towering Seeing Through Babel was added to the permanent collection of the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto in 2023. The 2016 recipient of the Robert Bosch Stiftung prize, he created the short film Four Acts for Syria. A member for two decades of the Silkroad ensemble, he is one of the artists featured in the documentary The Music of Strangers, directed by Morgan Neville.

He has exhibited in galleries around the US, Europe and the Middle East, including the Asia Society Triennial in 2020, the Spurlock Museum, Illinois,(2020), the Paris Art Fair, (2019), the Rose Art Museum, Boston (2017), the Claude Lemand Gallery, Paris (2016), Kuchling Galerie in Berlin (2019), and Tabari Art Space, Dubai, (2019). He is the recipient of a 2023 New York State Council of the Arts grant and was a fellow at the Fountainhead residency in Miami in 2024. He is represented by Galerie Tanit, Beirut and Munich. His most recent exhibition was with Perrotin in Shanghai in Spring 2025. View further information about Kevork’s work at kevorkmourad.com.

The music of guitarist and composer Aram Bajakian music has been called “a masterpiece” (fRoots), “shape-shifting” (FreeJazzCollective), and “sometimes delicate, sometimes punishing” (Chicago Reader). As a guitarist, “the virtuosic jack of all trades” (Village Voice) has toured extensively with Lou Reed, Madeleine Peyroux, John Zorn and Diana Krall. From 2018-2021, Bajakian served as the New Music Curator at Western Front in Vancouver, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centers for contemporary art and new music. Bajakian received his Bachelor of Music degree (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he studied with Dr. Yusef Lateef.

He holds a Master of Arts Degree in Music Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, where his advisor is Dr. Nathan Hesselink. His research focuses on contemporary and historic Armenian communities. http://mynameisaram.net/

Tatevik Ayvazyan London-based writer and producer with Rebel Republic Films, co-founder of London’s Armenian Film Festival and the former director of the Armenian Institute. She is the producer of the award-winning poetry film, Taniel, and is currently adapting Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl. She’s a board member of the International Armenian Literary Alliance, focusing on translation projects, and of Azad Archives.

This roundtable will delve into the institutional and collective significance of engaging with memory politics in today's socio-political climate, particularly in light of the rise of right-wing politics. Speakers will explore the pressing challenges faced by artists and creative practitioners in securing support and funding, the diminishing resources available to memory institutions, and strategies for sustaining their existence. The conversation will also consider the role of international solidarity and cooperation, and how diasporic institutions navigate their unique modes of resistance and support. Through this discussion, we hope to shed light on both the challenges and the hope embodied in the ongoing struggle for preserving memory for justice and remembering our past.

Tatevik Ayvazyan London-based writer and producer with Rebel Republic Films, co-founder of London’s Armenian Film Festival and the former director of the Armenian Institute. She is the producer of the award-winning poetry film, Taniel, and is currently adapting Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl. She’s a board member of the International Armenian Literary Alliance, focusing on translation projects, and of Azad Archives.

Oksana Mirzoyan is an Armenian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and director known for her visceral, narrative-driven work. Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, she became a refugee as a child due to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and resettled in the United States, where she was raised. Her award-winning films have screened internationally at Berlinale, Locarno, Clermont-Ferrand, and Camerimage. Her short film 140 Drams was honored by the International Cinematographers Guild and featured in Atom Egoyan’s curated program “Diaspora: Armenia.” She is a Kresge Arts Fellow, and her films have been exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts and commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Mirzoyan is a founder of ONEArmenia, a nonprofit supporting sustainable development through cultural and technological initiatives in Armenia. During her years living in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh, she collaborated with institutions such as the U.S. Embassy in Armenia, the Tufenkian Foundation, HALO Trust, and the Children of Armenia Fund on projects spanning education, civil society, archaeological preservation, and demining efforts. She has taught filmmaking at institutions such as the University of Michigan, the University of Rochester, and the Tumo Creative Technology Center, and most recently taught narrative filmmaking at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Screenwriting and Directing at Columbia University in New York, and developing two feature films: Abysm and Isle of Light.

Asena Günal (1973), obtained her BS in International Relations, MA in Sociology from METU and PhD from Boğaziçi University Atatürk Institute. She has worked as an editor at İletişim Publishing House from 1998 to 2005. She started to work as the program coordinator of Depo from September 2008 on. Günal is a co-founder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship cases in the arts in Turkey, and was a fellow of the AHDA Program at Columbia University in 2014. She is the executive director of Anadolu Kültür. Günal is the 2019 German-French Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law laureate.

Nayat Karaköse is the Director of Programs at the Hrant Dink Foundation in Istanbul, Turkey, where she oversees projects related to hate speech, discrimination, cultural heritage, minority rights, and dealing with the past. She also coordinates the 23.5 Hrant Dink Site of Memory. Her expertise includes hate speech, memorialization, and minority rights. Nayat holds an MA in Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Essex and a BA in Sociology from Galatasaray University. She was an Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability Fellow at Columbia University (2014) and a Distinguished Humphrey Fellow at the University of Washington (2021).

Meltem Aslan is a founding member and co-director of Hakikat Adalet Hafıza Merkezi (Hafıza Merkezi, Truth Justice Memory Center). She is also a founding member and director of Antenna, a Berlin-based initiative aimed at connecting Turkey’s civil society with the global human rights community to foster collective resistance to authoritarianism. From 2009 to 2018, Ms Aslan served as the executive director of Anadolu Kültür, where she focused on fostering intercultural dialogue, reconciliation, and mutual understanding through arts and culture. Over the past 20 years in civic space, her work has also included advocating for women’s rights with Kadın Yurttaş Ağı Derneği (KAYA) and promoting good governance through her role at TESEV.

Ms Aslan holds a Master of International Affairs (MIA) degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where she was a Turkish Education Foundation (TEV) fellow, and a Master of Human Rights from the European Inter-University. Her academic work includes a thesis on violations of freedom of expression in Turkey in the name of state security. She also earned a BA in Business Administration from Bosphorus University in Istanbul. Her current work centers on transitional justice, addressing the past, and fostering intercultural dialogue and resistance to authoritarianism through innovative advocacy and research approaches. She has participated in global conferences and workshops, including the ICTJ’s Cape Town Transitional Justice Fellowship, and has lectured on these topics at Turkish universities. With over 25 years of experience in international consultancy, civil society leadership and human rights advocacy, Ms Aslan continues to contribute to strengthening civic space and justice frameworks globally.

Both through artistic practices and lived experiences, this session will explore key considerations and debates on archives, artistic interventions into the past through archival materials, and the role of storytelling in shaping memory in the present. Focusing on the remembrance of the Armenian Genocide amid denialism and its political aftermath, the discussion will also address the significance of diasporic archive-making.

Maviş Güneşer is a musician preserving and revitalizing the Zazaki language through her work. She began her career in 1994 with Agirê Jiyan and released her first solo album Keje (1998). After moving to Berlin in 2002, she collaborated with Metin & Kemal Kahraman and Lilith Band, contributing to multiple albums and concerts. She composed music for films by Binevsa Berivan and Tülin Dağ and released her second album, Ax de Vaji (2019), documenting Dersim’s political history through laments.

Her third album, Dılgran (2023), explores personal themes and modernizes Zazaki music. Currently, she researches and archives Hewaê Ceniyu/Women’s Songs of Dersim, analyzing their role in gender and power dynamics.  YouTube (insert link Youtube, https://bit.ly/3SrZ0Gi) 

Olivia Melkonian is a producer, DJ and sonic archivist invested in projects of cultural preservation. She explores the endangered Western Armenian experience through immersive sonic offerings, embracing moments of intimacy and stillness, archiving dialect and collective memory with a focus on family and the home. Through her practice, she presents memory as a tool of resistance and recording as an act of revolution.

Araxie Cass is an Armenian American writer and editor of Azad Archives, an alternative Armenian platform dedicated to community learning and amplifying marginalized voices. They studied Creative Writing and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and their work has been featured in the Armenian Weekly, H-Pem, the HyePhen and HyeBred magazine. Their work is inspired by the boundless creativity of nature and their ancient ancestral artistic traditions, and includes creative nonfiction essays, poetry, and an upcoming Armenian-inspired sci-fi.

(Azad Archives is an online submission-based platform addressing key issues both within and against our community through literature, art, music, and more. We see archives as both lost and found, recognizing the gaps in historical records and in our individual and collective memories. We believe that even what has been forgotten can be rediscovered and reimagined within a new archive, creating an opportunity to heal and reconnect.)

Sophia Hadeshian holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from The CUNY Graduate Center, focusing her research on memory work within postcolonial literature and photography. She earned her BA in Journalism with a minor in Media Studies from SUNY Purchase College, and a concentration in Visual Arts. Currently, she coordinates archival projects at Magnum Photos in New York, and is a dedicated board member of Kooyrigs and a co-founder of Azad Archives. Azad Archives is an online submission-based platform addressing key issues both within and against our community through literature, art, music, and more.

We see archives as both lost and found, recognizing the gaps in historical records and in our individual and collective memories. We believe that even what has been forgotten can be rediscovered and reimagined within a new archive, creating an opportunity to heal and reconnect.

The music of guitarist and composer Aram Bajakian music has been called “a masterpiece” (fRoots), “shape-shifting” (FreeJazzCollective), and “sometimes delicate, sometimes punishing” (Chicago Reader). As a guitarist, “the virtuosic jack of all trades” (Village Voice) has toured extensively with Lou Reed, Madeleine Peyroux, John Zorn and Diana Krall. From 2018-2021, Bajakian served as the New Music Curator at Western Front in Vancouver, one of Canada’s leading artist-run centers for contemporary art and new music.

Bajakian received his Bachelor of Music degree (Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he studied with Dr. Yusef Lateef. He holds a Master of Arts Degree in Music Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and Master of Music degree in Music Composition from the University of British Columbia. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia, where his advisor is Dr. Nathan Hesselink. His research focuses on contemporary and historic Armenian communities. Aram Bajkian hosts a dedicated website at mynameisaram.net/.

This keynote explores a memory-based approach that utilizes photography and storytelling to engage with family history. By sharing personal narratives, the work seeks to humanize what are often seen as distant historical events. Beginning over a decade ago in Türkiye, this project has been presented in various countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Armenia, and most recently in Greece.

Through the use of family photographs and archival materials, the work highlights how personal histories can reveal broader cultural and historical contexts, offering fresh perspectives on the past.

Armen T. Marsoobian is Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University, Affiliated Faculty at the Gladstein Family Human Rights Institute of the University of Connecticut, and a Visiting Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University. He edits the journal Metaphilosophy. He held visiting positions at Columbia University. He has lectured and published extensively on topics in genocide studies, human rights, moral philosophy, aesthetics, and Ottoman Armenian photography.

He has published seven books, including his award-winning, Fragments of a Lost Homeland: Remembering Armenia, which is based upon extensive research about his family, accomplished photographers in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and the United States. Exhibitions of their photography were mounted in Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Great Britain, and the United States. His companion exhibition volume, Reimagining a Lost Armenian Home: The Dildilian Photography Collection, was published in both English and Turkish.

Özge Çelikaslan is a film and media scholar and practitioner, with a focus on community-driven archival and artistic projects. She holds a PhD in media studies from Braunschweig University of Art in Germany. As a co-founder of multiple collectives and initiatives, Özge has contributed to several significant cultural projects. In 2014, she co-founded bak.ma, a digital media archive dedicated to social movements, where she remains an active member. She has also served as the director of Koza Visual Culture and Arts Association, leading collaborative film and public art initiatives with international artists and organizations.

Özge’s writings have been featured in both Turkish and English publications, and her documentary work has been presented at prestigious art institutions, festivals, and biennials. Her monograph, Archiving the Commons: Looking through the Lens of bak.ma, was published by dpr-barcelona in 2024.

A decade ago, the public art project FROZEN brought together artists and communities from Armenia and Turkey to bridge divides through shared creative practices. In this panel, project coordinators and participating artists reflect on the fleeting moments of connection it fostered and the enduring challenges of sustaining dialogue within and between local communities.

Armine Avetisyan is a peacebuilding practitioner and cultural organizer with over a decade of experience leveraging arts and culture to foster dialogue and transform conflict. With a background in project management and community engagement across the South Caucasus, Turkey, and the United States, she currently manages programs at Brandeis University and IMPACT, a global non-profit working to transform conflict with arts and culture.

Her work bridges academic, civil society, and artistic spheres, emphasizing innovative, creative approaches to coexistence and social transformation. Armine holds advanced degrees in Peace Studies from Brandeis University and Cultural Management from Istanbul Bilgi University.

Erhan Arık is a social documentary photographer born in Ardahan, Turkey, in 1984. He graduated from the Department of Journalism, where he studied under Merter Oral, a notable figure in social documentary photography. Since 2010, Erhan has focused on photography and video projects that explore the memory of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. His acclaimed work Horovel, which examines villages on the Turkey-Armenia border, has been exhibited in Turkey, Armenia, and France.

His ongoing project Gayan, which spans over two and a half years, documents Armenian villages in the Middle East, and has been shown in exhibitions in Istanbul, Esfahan, and Tehran. Erhan's documentaries Remembering and Voice were featured at the IDFA in the Netherlands in 2010. His current feature-length documentary project, Our Seeds (wt), is supported by institutions such as IDFA, Sundance, and the Redford Grant Center.

Arman Tadevosyan was born in 1983 in Leninakan (now Gyumri), Armenia, and has been living and working in Nancy, France, since 2010. In 1988, at the age of five, he witnessed the devastating earthquake that struck Leninakan. The destruction and despair left a profound impression on him, shaping his artistic perspective. In 2008, he graduated from the Gyumri Academy of Art, specializing in visual arts. His artistic practice spans multiple disciplines, including painting, video, and photography. Tadevosyan is the co-founder of the 5th Floor Cultural Group, established in 2006, and the Gyumri Art Week contemporary art festival, launched in 2020. Since 2010, he has collaborated with the Nancy Film Festival, curating a special screening section dedicated to Eastern European films and directors.

Over the years, he has curated and led numerous projects, serving as a cultural bridge between artists from the South Caucasus region and France. In 2011, alongside his colleagues Özge and Armine , he initiated the "Frozen" project, an artist residency program connecting Kars (Turkey), Gyumri (Armenia), and Diyarbakır (Turkey). Between 2012 and 2014, he coordinated the "Transkaukazja" and "Borderland54" projects in France. His works have been exhibited in numerous group shows worldwide, as well as in several solo exhibitions, including Cathédrale de Metz, Gallery Socles et Cimaises, Cathédrale de Fürth, Gallery La Douëra, and Gallery Madame de Graffigny.

Kübra Zeynep Sarıaslan is a social anthropologist whose research explores the intersection of media, gender, and transnational politics, with a particular focus on Turkey and Europe. She is currently an associated researcher at the University of Bern and the University of Zurich and works as a part-time lecturer. She was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, and the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin She was involved in and led research projects on civil dialogue and journalism in the context of Armenia-Turkey relations from a conflict transformation perspective.

Her current research builds upon her project entitled "Journalism at a Distance: Transnational Politics and Making Online News in Exile." She received her PhD from the University of Zurich and is the author of Empowering Housewives in Southeast Turkey: Gender, State and Development (2023, I.B. Tauris).

This panel explores how memory, history, storytelling, and performance intersect in multidisciplinary art practices, moving beyond traditional spaces to engage audiences in dynamic cultural dialogues. Through collaborations and diverse media, the panelists navigate suppressed pasts, challenge dominant narratives, and seek to create solidarities despite institutional challenges.

By weaving fiction, archival intervention, and performative acts, they reveal how art can sustain a living culture that reimagines history and expands contemporary understanding.

In recent years, Silvina Der Meguerditchian has developed a distinctive artistic practice that operates at the intersections of memory, migration and cultural heritage. Her work is characterised by a dialogical and collaborative process that interweaves personal and collective stories and creates transgenerational connections. With an interdisciplinary approach, she combines performative practices, textile craftsmanship and (audio-)visual media to create living archives and poetic spaces that open up new scope for action in a globalised society. Her works question social and cultural constructions of identities and affiliations and, through innovative forms of linking and arranging, bring together the supposedly incompatible, the hidden or the forgotten.

Born in Buenos Aires as the grand-daughter of Armenian grandparents, Silvina Der Meguerditchian has lived and worked in Berlin since 1988. Her works have been exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), the Martin-Gropius-Bau (‘Urban Realities: Focus Istanbul’, 2005) and the Hamburger Bahnhof (‘Hello World. Revising a Collection’, 2018). Currently she is displaying her most extensive exhibition to these days at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Bethanien (Berlin) and participating at “Home is where we start from” a important group exhibition in Geneva about the feminine perspective on migration.

In her collective and individual artistic practice spanning diverse media defined by her research, İz Öztat explores the persistence of violent histories through forms, materials, space and language. She responds to absences in official historiography through spectral, intergenerational and speculative fictions.  Öztat is a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme (2024-25). Her academic articles, essays and fictional texts have been published in various media. She has worked at the intersection of art and education in self-organized, institutional, and academic settings.

Selected exhibitions include Self-determination: A Global Perspective, IMMA, Dublin (2023); Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13 (2017); and Salt Water: A Theory on Thought Forms, 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015).

Karen Babayan was born in Tehran to Armenian/British parents and moved to the UK in 1979 due to the Islamic Revolution and now resides in rural Cumbria, near the lakes and mountains she cherishes. An established multi-disciplinary artist, writer, and curator, Babayan’s work has been showcased both nationally and internationally, with pieces held in several public collections. She earned a PhD in Contemporary Art Practice in 2016 and published her first book of short stories, Blood Oranges Dipped in Salt. Her second book, Swallows and Armenians, delves into the Anglo-Armenian family from Aleppo that inspired author Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.

Babayan is currently working on her first novel while preparing Swallows and Armenians for a stage production, which will be performed in London and Leeds in June 2025. For more info: karenbabayan.com.

Işın Önol is a curator, writer, and art professor based in New York City and Vienna. She currently serves as Director of Curatorial Research at the School of Visual Arts, MA Curatorial Practice Program in NYC. Her curatorial research focuses on connecting archival information with oral histories to create platforms for collective memory through collaborative art practices. Önol has been a guest professor, critic, and curator at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2022-2023 and 2016-2017), Montclair State University (2017-2022), and a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University (2016-2020). She co-founded and directs Nesin Art Village, an independent art school in Turkey.

Önol completed the postgraduate curatorial study program at École du Magasin, holds an MFA from Sabancı University, Istanbul, an MAS from Zürich University of the Arts, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. She is a member of IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, and has been elected twice to the Board of Directors of the Roberto Cimetta Fund, which supports the mobility of artists in the Mediterranean region.

Varduhi Balyan is developing her first feature documentary, The Absence of 1. Both a character study as well as a narrative montage of archival research and a dictionary of local idioms that capture the landscape, customs, and everyday life of the region, Balyan explores displacement during the unofficial population exchange between Armenia and Azerbaijan before the 1990s war, and her family’s unspoken history tied to it, which lies in the village where she spent her childhood summers.

Since 2015, Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, with B. Güldoğan, has been writing Չünքüşաbaտum | Çüngüşabadoum: The Dictionary of (In)animate Objects and Tales of Hearsay. Centering around the eastern Anatolian village of Çüngüş/Chunkoush—the birthplace of their great-grandparents: one the mass organizer of the Armenian massacres in the region; the other, the sole survivor of his family after 1915—their multimedia project superimposes opposite sides of their inherited “historical records” to catalogue a different story of relationality through shared family trauma and archival redactions that resist reparative or reconciliatory frames. 

Banu Karaca’s current research examines how art dispossessed in episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic has shaped the knowledge production on (post-)Ottoman heritage and the writing of art history. 

David Kazanjian’s forthcoming article “Home Is Where the Sleeping Bags Lie” is what he calls a “displaced” “resurrection” of a long-censored text after the Turkish pavilion of the 2015 Venice Biennale printed, but never distributed, the catalog for Sarkis’ 7 Tage, 7 Nächte (7 Days, 7 Nights) exhibition. He considers this censorship alongside Gil Scott-Heron’s song “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” and current student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza. Bridging historical and contemporary erasures and how they come (or not) to be catalogued and produce knowledge, these panelists will be in conversation about preservation, restitution, censorship, temporality, and the limits of dialogue in memory politics.

About the speakers:

Varduhi Balyan (b. 1992) is a journalist and documentary filmmaker based between Istanbul and Armenia. As a migrant in Istanbul, she navigates a bureaucratic limbo, caught between two countries that share no diplomatic ties and remain divided by historical and political tensions. With a background in journalism and civil society, her work focuses on social memory, human rights, and displacement. For years, Balyan worked at Agos Newspaper and various civil society organizations, where she explored themes of memory and identity alongside other critical topics. Her transition to visual storytelling began with a collaboration with Public TV of Armenia, leading to her first short documentary, Dialogue in a Basket (2020), which delves into micro-sociological narratives.

She is currently developing her first feature documentary, The Absence of 1, a deeply personal exploration of displacement that stems from her family’s unspoken history and the village where she spent her childhood summers. Through the film, she reconnects with a formative childhood figure and documents the linguistic and cultural memory of the place. The project extends beyond the documentary itself, encompassing archival research and a dictionary of local idioms that capture the landscape, customs, and everyday life of the region. Her work on The Absence of 1 earned her a fellowship with BAK’s post-academic research program, hosted by the Istanbul Biennial’s ÇAP program. Additionally, she was selected for WHW Akademija 2025 as one of 12 participating artists, further expanding the project’s scope within a critical artistic and research-driven context.

Deanna Cachoian-Schanz is soon-to-hold her PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work and dissertation, “From Kin to Kind: Armenian Racialization and the Mediation of the Human in the Late-to-Post Ottoman Period” takes a posthumanist reading of the Armenian case to show how the speciated category of the “human”—and its gendered, racial subdivisions—was modulated through the emerging human-nonhuman divide alongside the late Ottoman border regime.

In addition to being an award-winning literary translator from Armenian, she has published on the translations and technologies of Ottoman racialization, gender, and nationalism in ASAP/Journal (2021), Social Text (2023), JSAS(2023), with AWST Press/Tilted Axis Press (2023), in the edited volume Critical Approaches to Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (2023), among o, hers, and is forthcoming in Encounters in Translation. Since 2015, she is co-writing, with Bengi Güldoğan, Չünքüşաbaտum | Çüngüşabadoum: The Dictionary of (In)animate Objects and Tales of Hearsay, a multimedia project on shared family trauma, archival redactions, and relationality outside of reconciliatory frames. Her most recent project with media philosopher Katia Schwerzmann focuses on human translation, AI language models, and neo-colonial algorithmic regimes.

Along with Veronika Zablotsky and David Kazanjian, she is the co-founder of the Critical Armenian Studies Collective.

Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics, and cultural policy, museum and feminist memory studies. She has published on freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, visual literacy, and restitution. She is the author of The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (Fordham University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). In 2011, she co-founded Siyah Bant, a research platform that documented censorship in the arts in Turkey.

Banu has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council for her project “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge,” which she directs at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Her current research examines how art dispossessed in episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic has shaped the knowledge production on (post-)Ottoman heritage and the writing of art history.

David Kazanjian is chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. His areas of specialization are transnational American literary and historical studies through the 19th century, political philosophy, continental philosophy, Latin American studies, colonial discourse studies, and Armenian diaspora studies. His most recent monograph is The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Duke).

He is also the author of numerous articles including, most recently, “Infrastructure in Black: An Ante-Comons in Colonial New England) (Social Text 2023), “Storation: A Small Guide to Undoing Restoration” in Critical Approaches to Genocide (Routledge 2023), and “Ante-Possession: A History of Dispossession’s Present” (American Literary History, 2022).

Ends: 18:45

This event series is the culmination of a project funded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in association with the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, exploring creative practice and memory in the diaspora (sensory studies), with specific reference to Armenian–Turkish relations.

Disclaimer: Support by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation does not constitute endorsement of any specific opinion, perspective or approach expressed or utilised in this event.