Forbidden, 2015, digital collage made of pencil drawing, lino print, photos*, internet screenshot *photographs
In an attempt to assimilate into the culture of the British (post)colonial matrix of power that I grew up surrounded by, I gradually began to ignore much of my Armenian identity (while always being spoken to by my parents in the Iranian dialect of Eastern Armenian). I have only been critically revisiting this part of my identity in the past year, pretty much since the 99th anniversary of the genocide. On that day in 2014 I decided to visit Burak Delier’s exhibit ion at the Institute of International Visual Arts, and then realised how conceptually unnerving that was for me: to visit an exhibition about capitalism and art made by a Turkish artist, during my final year of art school (where I began to explore race discourse and whiteness), when I have not even begun to properly revisit and have an internal dialogue with my Armenian-ness.
A year later and in the weeks leading up to the genocide centennial, this significant historical moment was becoming more visible to the world, and to myself. As someone whose family has (according to my parents) lived in Iran for the past half-millenium, I had a certain kind of privilege. Although I grew up learning about this significant event (and that did affect me in some way), to not grow up with a family’s personal stories of violence and violation of the kind that the collective Armenian history identifies with means that my childhood idea of my Armenian identity was probably not on my mind as much as it may have been on the minds of those whose relatives are survivors or were victims of the Armenian Genocide. And so, in the early morning of Friday, April 24th, I had the urge to respond to my thoughts, in the spirit of decolonizing my mind and that of others when possible.