Thursday, January 8, 4:00-6:00 PM
Venue: Hrant Dink Foundation Anarad Hığutyun Building
Papa Roncalli St. No: 128 Harbiye, Şişli/İstanbul
*The talk will be in English and there will be no simultaneous translation.
To register for the event, please fill out the form.
Scholarly work engaging with Armenian-related archival content and materials often employs historical methods. This includes uncovering and writing through unseen repositories, questioning inaccessible archives, or (re)defining intergenerational memory through material traces. Archival institutions and digital humanities initiatives considering Armenian visual culture and records tend to focus on preservation, as well as access and community work. In this talk, Marianna Hovhannisyan situates the concept of “archive” as a theoretical inquiry and a site of contested knowledge. Drawing upon her current book project, Double Assimilations, Empty Fields, and Orphan Objects: Armenian Archival Imaginaries, Hovhannisyan examines how Armenian cultural production, specifically modernist-era arts and crafts, is defined by fragmentations and archival absences. Contemporary metadata categorization and artifact theories continue to shape how material fragments survive and circulate in transnational repositories as “folk” or “crafts.” This talk asks how can these frameworks also enable questioning and engagement with new epistemic openings.
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Marianna Hovhannisyan Marianna Hovhannisyan is an art historian and research-based curator who works at the intersection of postcolonial and decolonial archival and museum studies with a focus on folk studies, theories of art, artifacts, and metadata. Her recent writings appear in Stedelijk Studies Journal, Cultural Anthropology, and Archives and Traces of Migration. She was the Postdoctoral Fellow at the seminar “In Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruins,” led by Dr. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brown University, 2022–23). As a Hrant Dink Foundation Fellow, she conducted original research in the American Board Archives (Turkey, 2014–15). This resulted in her curatorial exhibition Empty Fields (commissioned by SALT, Istanbul, exhibition design concept: Fareed Armaly, 2016), a project that uncovered century-old museum fragments of Anatolia College and reconstructed the legacy of its curator, Armenian-German scientist Professor Johannes Manissadjian. She holds a Ph.D. in Art History (UCSD, 2022). |
