Armenian Monuments in Azerbaijan & How Armenian Artists are Preserving Culture with Artistic Creativity:
Source: Armenian Monuments are at risk in Azerbaijan. L.A. artists make their own to keep memory alive. from the Los Angeles Times December 16, 2020
There is a virtual, unusual art piece on the corner of Artsakh Avenue and East Broadway in Glendale that shows a veiled woman’s face (still from Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 film “The Color of Pomegranates” with the phrase “ARTSAKH ENDURES.” The catch is that this piece is only able to be experience with a smartphone. The piece is only visible with an augmented reality app and at a precise location. It reminds the observer of the bloody Nagorno-Karabakh War that has raged in Azerbaijan (Artsakh to Armenians).
Click here to get a glimpse of this monument: a collaboration among a group of Los Angeles artists and scholars. Designed by Kamee Abrahamian with contributions by Nelli Sargsyan and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. Nancy Baker Cahill made the monument possible to view on her 4th Wall application.
Caption: The work, says Hakopian, “imagines a future in which Artsakh is visible and a future in which Artsakh endures — even if it’s only virtually or in the memory of the diasporic peoples that have been displaced.”
Another commemorative effort is by the metal band System of a Down. Here is their first new music in fifteen years: “Protect the Land” and “Genocidal Humanoidz”.
A group of women artists called She Loves Collective staged guerrilla performances in 2017 to convey loss and trauma in the Armenian culture. You can watch it on Instagram.
Nare Mkrtchyan has used film to explore themes of the Armenian Genocide in “The Other Side of Home”.
Nare traveled to the region before Nagorno-Karabakh reverted to Azeri control.
“Among the places she traveled was the historic Tsitsernavank monastery, an early Armenian site whose earliest constructions likely date to the 5th or 6th century. ‘[I] was there less than an hour before the territory turned to Azerbaijan,’ she writes. ‘It is surreal to think that my Armenian prayer might be the last one in those walls.’”
A breviated list of Armenian monuments under Azerbaijani control: the graceful Dadivank monastery, which dates to the 12th century; the fan-roofed Gtichavank monastery, from the 13th century, once an important pilgrimage site; and the archeological site of Tigranakert, which dates to the Hellenestic era and is, in the words of Hamlet Petrosyan, an Armenian archeologist who has led research expeditions to the area, “the best-preserved city of the Hellenistic and Armenian civilizations.”
Art historian Christina Maranci has stated in the WSJ that Azerbaijan has a history of destroying the Armenian cultural heritage found in their territories. (https://www.wsj.com/articles/cultural-heritage-in-the-crosshairs-once-more-11605731198)
Scholars Simon Maghakyan and Sarah Pickman have recorded the destruction of 89 medieval Armenian churches and 5,840 khachkars (refer to my blog, Symbols of Armenia) between 1997 and 2006. Their work is published through Hyperallergic, a journal under the chief editing of Hrag Vartanian.
Maghakyan told The Times: “If I do not tell this story, who will?” (https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2019-11-07/armenian-monuments-azerbaijan)
Azeri officials have denied destroying these monuments and symbols; however, satellite imagery of Nakhichevan tell otherwise. Also to mention: “ Azeri officials are in the habit of regularly describing Armenian churches as ‘Caucasian Albanian,’ a specious classification that serves as a way of writing Armenians out of the region’s history.”
UNESCO issued a statement late last month reminding both nations that they are signatories to the 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and cited a U.N. Security Council Resolution from 2017 on the ‘unlawful destruction of cultural heritage, looting and smuggling of cultural property.’”
The conclusion of all of this, you may ask. What can Armenians do? We can create. And we are creating.
We must tell stories of struggle, displacement, erasure, but most of all – hope.
“The Artist and His Mother” by Arshile Gorky was created between 1926 and 1942 and held by the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.). It is him and his mother who died of malnutrition during the genocide.
Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, c. 1926-c. 1942, oil on canvas, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1979.13.1
“This is how Armenian culture has evolved, we take these stories and we take these instances and we build something new.” – Hrag Vartanian
We must use our voices to BE a voice.