AURORA PRIZE

Nina Kachadurian's installation 

Three television screens facing the audience show Nina, her father and her mother. The artist asks her parents a series of deliberately naive questions (to which she, no doubt, has long known the answers). Through this staged interview the audience learns about the dramatic history of Armenians who used to live in Turkey, the fact that Nina’s parents met in Beirut, that her mother is also a member of a minority at home and that as a result of his speaking Armenian, Lebanese, Turkish, English and French, her father’s accent had become so unrecognizable that many assume he is Hungarian. At one point all three speak at once, giving the viewer a chance to note the differences in pronunciation.

Behind them are three other television screens showing Nina and her parents meet with a pronunciation coach, who promises to rid them of their foreign accents. But the result is hardly satisfactory and probably unnecessary: for the artist, the story of her parents and the Armenian diaspora as a whole is encoded in the awkward sounds and characteristically imperfect accents. 

Nina’s installations, like those of the other 16 artists, is located on the grounds of the monastery of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, founded at the beginning of the 18th century by the monk Mkhitar who fled the Ottoman Empire and converted to Catholicism. The monastery quickly became a major global center of Armenian culture. It was there that the first book in Armenian was published in 1512, and the monastery print shop evolved into one of the largest European centers of publishing. 

Hera Buyuktashian's project

In the early 19th century George Gordon Byron (also known as Lord Byron) came to the monastery to study Armenian history and language in its vast library, which contains hundreds of thousands of volumes and manuscripts. He called Armenian “the language of paradise lost.” The artist Hera Buyuktashian from Istanbul makes a play on this phrase in her installation called “Letters from Paradise Lost,” located in the room where Byron was staying. Buyuktashian spells out the title of her exhibit using Armenian and English transliteration, placing each letter on a wooden block. The blocks themselves are assembled into a kind of musical instrument – they slide up and down, making a shrill, raspy sound. 

Hrair Sargsyan's photo project

The truth is often elusive. Sometimes it needs to be hidden, and that is what “Unsolved” (2012) – a series of photographs by Hrair Sargsyan – is about. It refers to those descendants of Armenians who had to convert to Islam during the Genocide to avoid certain death. Their grandchildren and great grandchildren who live in Turkey to this day were re-baptized when they learned about their roots. But having found their forgotten identity they lost most of their social connections and relationships – the Armenian community is reluctant to accept them while the Turkish majority is not ready to partake in their personal stories. The portraits made by Sargsyan depict these people as incomplete – they are immersed in darkness while a flash of light only reveals glimpses of their eyes, arms or legs.

Memories of the Genocide certainly permeate the work and personal lives of the artists. “All the participants are grandchildren and descendants of those who lived through those days,” said Adelina von Fürstenberg, curator of the pavilion. “No matter where they were born – in Aleppo, Bethlehem, Yerevan or Los Angeles – they share a special sensitivity toward the issues of borders, geography and territory, as well as issues of survival, adaptation and historical memory, not to mention a dream-like image of a country in which many of them have not had a chance to live.”