Between 1915 and 1923 as many as 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children died in Ottoman Turkey, the victims of execution, starvation, torture and death marches to the Syrian Desert.
These events are well-documented, and today many historians and nations recognize the massacre of the Armenians as the 20th Century’s first genocide.
Turkey, however, has refused to acknowledge the catastrophe, and surviving Armenians, who were forced into diaspora around the globe, were often reluctant to speak of their experiences to their children and grandchildren.
In the United States the Armenian genocide is not commonly taught in history classes, and the government has never officially recognized it, as other governments, such as France, Canada and Argentina, have done.
Nine Armenian-American artists from across the country explore the effects of growing up in this environment and the process of uncovering the truth in an exhibition now on view at the Beacon Street Gallery. Although inspired by sociopolitical events, the artworks focus on the personal side of the tragedy.
“We’re not interested in hitting anybody over the head about anything,” says Chicago artist and exhibition curator Naomi Pridjian. “We just want people to come up out of the silence we grew up in — the silence of American society.”
The exhibition presents almost 30 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures, assemblages, videos and photographs. Many of the pieces allude to a mysterious, disconnected family history. Jean Marie Casbarian’s paintings depict spectral figures barely emerging from dark backgrounds, as from the depths of memory. Her installation “Hollows of Man #3” consists of three Plexiglas sheets bearing Armenian script (a language the artist was not taught as a child) that hang in front of a painting of two shrouded, headless figures reaching for each other. Slightly distorted black-and-white images of ancestors also inhabit Elisa Khachian’s haunting images. The figures are placed against backgrounds depicting lace and linen, referring to pieces of handiwork that were among her family’s few surviving possessions.
The hardship of life in modern-day Armenia is the focus of John Mahtesian’s black-and-white photographs. These pictures illustrate a resilient people struggling in poverty, such as a woman leaning against a counter in a market bereft of goods or customers.
Tina Bastajian’s video “Jagadakeer,” meaning fate or, literally, “what is written on the forehead,” includes old family portraits, evocative images from Armenian culture and stylized tableaus from real and imagined sites. Women dance with jewels and flower petals in their belly buttons and a young woman in sumptuous traditional dress slices onions while the soundtrack plays personal testimonies of the genocide, gunfire and the taking of a family portrait. “Will they remember us?” a child asks before the photographer shoots the picture.
“Our story is unique, and yet it’s not unique at all,” Pridjian notes. “If we can elicit a personal response from people then maybe we can do just a tiny bit to promote the idea of sameness rather than otherness.”
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“Inheritance: Art and Images Beyond a Silenced Genocide”
When: Through April 26
Where: Beacon Street Gallery, 4131 N. Broadway
Price: Free; 773-525-7579
