Scholarly work with Armenian-related archival materials often involves uncovering unseen repositories, questioning inaccessible archives, and (re)defining intergenerational memory through material traces. Archival institutions and digital humanities initiatives, meanwhile, tend to focus on preservation, as well as access and community work. In this talk, Marianna Hovhannisyan situates the “archive” as a theoretical inquiry and a site of contested knowledge. Drawing upon her 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 theories of artifacts continue to shape how these material fragments survive and circulate in transnational repositories as “folk” or “crafts.” This talk asks how these frameworks might also enable questioning and engagement with new epistemic openings.
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 writings appear in Stedelijk Studies Journal,The (re)Orient (FA Publisher), and Daedalus Journal (co-author Dr. Anne Gilliland, forthcoming). Postdoctoral positions include the seminar “In Afterlives and Aftermaths of Ruins,” led by Dr. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (Brown University, 2022–23), and the A.W. Mellon Visual and Digital Storytelling Fellowship (Wesleyan University, 2023–24). Hovhannisyan’s current book project, Double Assimilations, Empty Fields, and Orphan Objects: Armenian Archival Imaginaries, critically engages with Armenian modern-era arts and crafts that have been subjected to epistemic violence through forced displacement, archival silences, and cultural appropriations. The second book project builds on her Hrant Dink Foundation Fellowship, during which she conducted original research in the American Board Archives (Turkey, 2014–15). This research formed the basis of her curatorial exhibition Empty Fields (SALT, Istanbul, 2016) with design concept by Fareed Armaly. The exhibition uncovered century-old museum fragments of Anatolia College, reconstructing the legacy of its curator, Johannes Manissadjian, an Armenian-German scientist and Armenian Genocide survivor. Her Ph.D. in Art History (UCSD, 2022) received the 2023 Chancellor Dissertation Medal for the School of Arts and Humanities.
Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics, and cultural policy, museum and feminist memory studies. She is the author of The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (Fordham University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). She has published on freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, visual literacy, and restitution. At the Forum Transregionale Studien, she directs the research group “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) supported by a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council.
The event is part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661). More information on the project and the conversation series can he found here.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
