Venice 2015 Ten Years On: Creative Resistance and Contemporary Crises

2026-01-25 - 21:06

Listen to the AI generated audio article. Your browser does not support the audio element. “Armenia cannot lean toward existing theories. It cannot be comfortably located in the generally recognized lineaments of contemporary imperialism and received postcolonialism. It has been too much in the interstices to fit such a location. Indeed, that is its importance. Its history is diversified, with many loyalties crosshatching so small a place, if indeed it is more a place than a state of mind over the centuries.” — Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak “Other Asias” Exactly ten years ago, a collective exhibition came to a close on the Venetian Lagoon, yet its artistic and political discourse still resonate today with striking relevance. From May to November 2015, the year marking the centenary of the Armenian genocide, the Republic of Armenia presented a group show at the Mekhitarist Monastery of San Lazzaro. The exhibition brought together artists exclusively from the global Armenian diaspora. It was a decisive departure from two decades of official Armenian participation at the Venice Art Biennale, which had featured almost exclusively artists from within the country. But an exceptional year called for an exceptional project. The curator, Adelina Cüberyan von Fürstenberg, herself a member of the diaspora, brought together works of 18 artists, including two duos, of different ages, geographies and renown. By naming the exhibition Armenity/Հայություն, von Fürstenberg invited the artists to explore their Armenian identity, individually and collectively, 100 years after forced dispersion. But how could they meaningfully do so when what they share most is transgenerational deterritorialization, traumatic heritage, and an inherited Armenity performed across the planet, always in dialogue with the dominant culture of their country of settlement? This question feels urgent today as Armenians navigate their post-2020 reality. Following the devastating, Azerbaijani-led 44-Day War and the subsequent loss of Artsakh in 2023, debates over who speaks for Armenia and Armenians, how territorial integrity relates to cultural identity, and what models might sustain Armenian communities have become fiercely contested across cultural and political spheres. Yet the Armenity/Հայություն exhibition offers something rare: a blueprint for contemporary identity that transcends traditional narratives of loss and mourning. Although state-commissioned, the project fundamentally challenged nation-state models of cultural representation, celebrating Armenia’s multilocal nature rather than lamenting territorial dispersion. Let’s look back at their artistic strategies. They created empowering, intersectional forms of being Armenian in the 21st century—tools that provide contemporary Armenian communities with powerful means for emancipation and self-affirmation precisely through their ever-dispersed condition. My Ani Do Not Cry In Armenian homes, paintings of Mt. Ararat, maps of Greater Armenia, and sketches of Akhtamar hang on walls and rest on shelves—quiet reminders of lost territories and deserted heritage sites. From childhood, our collective imagination is shaped by this iconography of decay: the memory of a once-prosperous nation lingers like a persistent horizon. Families pass down its glory and traditions, but so do institutional spaces like schools and churches, which serve as official sites of cultural transmission and narrative production, shaping how generations understand and enact their Armenian identity. The medieval site of Ani holds a prominent place in this pantheon of ruins. Perched on a promontory overlooking the Arax River, it sits right on the border between Armenia and Turkey—between historical and contemporary Armenia. Its image appears on postage stamps, cigarette packs and beer bottles. Despite becoming a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2016, Ani remains severely threatened. Restoration falls to Turkish authorities. The sight of Ani in ruins remains an essential part of the collective Armenian visual imagination. For her site-specific installation in Venice, artist Anna Boghiguian invokes this imagery of desolate Ani. Having visited the site herself, she offers an intimate chronicle of this personal pilgrimage. In notebooks combining gouaches, watercolors and wax, she records her travel notes, impressions and memories. She draws and writes on and around photographs of the medieval site, layering her impressions upon them and engaging in an intimate dialogue with this national symbol. Rather than glorifying the city’s heroic past, marveling at what it must have been or at what remains of its grandeur, she adopts the Benjaminian posture of the flâneur:[1] one who seeks neither “grand memories” nor “the historical frisson,” but rather the fortuitous, unplanned encounter. Anna Boghiguian, Ani, 2015, site-specific installation. Installation view, “Armenity/Հայություն”, Mekhitarist Monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Venice. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut © Piero Demo. In doing so, she steps beyond the collective dream of nationalist grandeur and discovers other dreams, ones more open to alterity. She moves past the idea of perpetual condemnation to erasure and oblivion, actively engaging with a heritage she restores to life. Responding to a popular folk poem sometimes attributed to Alexander Araratian,[2] in an exhibition booklet titled Do Not Cry Ani, Boghiguian writes: “My Ani do not cry. Please do not cry. But we can collect your ashes. Your past in a vase that is part of our history, there you can meet the eternal.” She consoles Ani and liberates her from lamentation, celebrating the city’s vitality rather than dwelling solely on its ruin. Suspended from the ceiling, papier-mâché birds with outstretched wings hover above the artist’s reconstituted Ani. Like Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, these birds do not turn away from catastrophe—yet they are mobile, engaged and capable of crossing the Armenian-Turkish border that the site straddles. They fly beyond the installation walls, traverse Ani’s ramparts, and soar into the open-air cloister. Boghiguian acknowledges catastrophe without being paralyzed by it. Her birds traverse borders that politics have closed, suggesting that heritage need not be anchored exclusively to territorial sovereignty but can find sustenance in mobile, creative engagement. This is not forgetting; it is refusing to let loss be the only story we tell. Anna Boghiguian, Ani, 2015, site-specific installation. Installation view, “Armenity/Հայություն”, Mekhitarist Monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Venice. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut © Piero Demo. Deterritorialization The exile of Armenians following the 1915 genocide was more than simple geographic dispersion—it entailed the complete collapse of survivors’ spatial, cultural, symbolic, and linguistic reference points. This radical uprooting can be understood through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of “deterritorialization”.[3] In their critique of capitalism, they describe it as a process where subjects break free from fixed attachments and structures of alienation. For these French thinkers, deterritorialization can be productive: it allows for a reconfiguration of subjectivities. If this reconfiguration does not take the form of a reactionary reterritorialization, then it opens paths toward emancipation. Of course, genocide and forced displacement as drivers of deterritorialization represent an extreme case. My aim here is not to present the fragmentation of the Armenian nation as anything other than a catastrophe or an imprescriptible crime. Yet this analytical framework allows us to approach certain diasporic cultural practices beyond simple commemoration of loss or memorial preservation. It invites us to consider how strategies for cultural survival within the global Armenian diaspora have produced hybrid and emancipatory forms of expression. Nina Katchadourian’s work in the exhibition illustrates how this deterritorialization translates into language. The American artist’s father is Armenian, born in Istanbul and raised in Beirut, while her mother comes from a Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. Born in New York, Katchadourian presents a 2005 artwork, Accent Elimination, a video installation in which three family members grapple with a perilous exercise: making one’s own accent disappear to adopt another’s. Taking turns reciting their scripts, the parents present their life trajectories, explaining how and why their linguistic identities became barely identifiable. After this first sequence, each participant tackles the exercise again, this time disguising their accent. Nina attempts to reproduce her father’s or mother’s accent, depending on whom she’s addressing, while the parents strive to speak in perfectly neutral American English. What is compelling is that in the response to the invitation to Armenity/Հայություն, the artist chooses a work produced ten years earlier. To speak to her Armenity, Katchadourian speaks to the multiplicity of origins and territories that compose her necessarily plural identity as a diasporic artist in the 21st century. Nina Katchadourian, Accent Elimination, 2005, six monitors, three channels of synchronized video, three single-channel video loops, six media players, three sets of headphones, three pedestals, two benches. Installation view, “Accent Elimination”, Studiengalerie 1.357, Goethe University, Frankfurt, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco. Accent Elimination does more than document family particularities. The work engages a dominant language, standard American English, which in the mouths of the artist’s parents carries what Deleuze and Guattari call “a high coefficient of deterritorialization”.[4] In doing so, it makes an immediate political statement about identity and its erasure, migration and historical silence. The voices of the Katchadourian family overflow their individual circumstances to carry a broader collective condition—that of the entire Armenian diaspora, and perhaps of all exiles. Armenity-as-Relation Building on concepts forged by Deleuze and Guattari, Édouard Glissant proposes a complementary concept from the highly hybrid context of the Caribbean: relation-identity.[5] Following a vegetal metaphor, he contrasts root-identity with rhizome-identity. Rhizome-identity conceives of identity through the connections it weaves with the other, rather than as something fixed, stable, atavistic, and ultimately destructive. Identity has no stable or bounded essence. Rather, it constitutes a dynamic process, founded on relation. The collaborative work of Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas powerfully expresses this relational logic of identity. The artist couple embodies this approach themselves: Gabri, born in Iran of Armenian origin, and Anastas, born in Bethlehem in occupied Palestine, develop an artistic practice that transcends identity boundaries to explore underground connections between minoritarian experiences. Their collaboration reflects a conscious political commitment that makes intersectionality a creative principle. In their installation When Counting Loses Its Sense, Gabri and Anastas combine visual archives from the Mekhitarist monastery’s collections with textual interventions. They superimpose typewritten texts onto period photographs. These texts, virulent against imperial and republican Turkish authorities, reveal the logic of a murderous pan-Turkism that targeted not only Armenians but all minority peoples of the Ottoman Empire and later modern Turkey. The typewriter, the documentary and testimonial tool par excellence, becomes the instrument of a counter-history that disrupts the apparent neutrality of archival images. The black-and-white photographs that form the backdrop of their work do not all represent Armenian subjects. One image shows Greek children in traditional costumes. Another presents a grim inventory of racist massacres perpetrated against every Ottoman minority group. Finally, the piece A Hundred Apologies Will Not Amount—a sort of open letter to Turkey—takes as its backdrop a Turco-Islamic mausoleum from the Seljuk period: the Döner Kümbet türbe, built in Caesarea in 1276. The choice of this monument creates a subtle shift in perspective, revealing the complexity of memory regimes through which the legacy of state violence is negotiated today. Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas, We Had All the Amounts in Hand and It Amounted to Nothing, from the series From When Counting Loses Its Sense, 2015, mixed media, paper, ink, pencil, collage, interventions, scratches, cuts, traces, etc. Courtesy of the artists. Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas, A Hundred Apologies Will Not Amount, from the series From When Counting Loses Its Sense, 2015, mixed media, paper, ink, pencil, collage, interventions, scratches, cuts, traces, etc. Courtesy of the artists. Ayreen Anastas’s Palestinian experience brings a political dimension to this artistic work, placing it within the contemporary geopolitics of oppressed minorities, where yesterday’s necropolitical logics persist in new forms. Through these connections, Gabri and Anastas reframe the Armenian genocide within a broader analysis of how dehumanization and extermination operate today. This creative alliance between two minoritarian memories isn’t simply about juxtaposing two parallel sufferings side by side; it creates a shared language of solidarity and shared resistance against contemporary forces of violence. In Venice in 2015, expressing one’s Armenity meant doing so at the crossroads of self and others. What emerged was less a fixed root-identity than an Armenity-as-Relation. Like Boghiguian’s birds that traverse closed borders, Katchadourian’s voices carrying the weight of all exiles, or Gabri and Anastas’s intersectional solidarity, these works rejected the constraints of territorial sovereignty and nationalist essentialism. Instead, they celebrated the creative potential of dispersion, reconnecting with a centuries-old tradition of transnational existence. What historians call the “Armenian cultural Renaissance” of the 19th century was essentially diasporic—decentralized and stateless, with multiple centers of intellectual life and cultural production coexisting from Madras to Vienna, Constantinople to Tbilisi, Yerevan to Paris. Armenian culture survived the genocide precisely through this decentralization, through its creative centers already dispersed across the world. The Venetian exhibition celebrated this scattered identity, transforming what may seem like fragility—the absence of a unified and secure sovereign territory—into an inexhaustible source of creativity and resistance. Today, as Armenians navigate post-2020 realities marked by the loss of Artsakh and ongoing threats, this embrace of multilocalness offers emancipatory possibilities. Identity becomes not something to preserve intact, but something continuously remade through encounter and exchange. Footnotes: [1] Walter Benjamin, “The Return of the Flâneur”, review of Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin (Leipzig and Vienna: Verlag Dr Hans Epstein, 1929), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, II 1927-1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1999). [2] «Անի քաղաք նստէր՝ կուլայ,/Չկայ ըսող՝ մի լայ, մի լայ./Կ’ըսես քիչ է, թո՛ղ, մնայ՝ լայ,/Ա՜խ, ե՞րբ լսեմ մի՛ լայ, մի՛ լայ:» The full poem can be read here. [3] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York City, NY: Viking Press, 1977). [4] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). [5] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Comment