October 13 through December 2, 2022
Reception and Talk: October 13 6:00-8:00pm
JKC gallery is thrilled to present, How The World Might Be, an exhibition by Los Angeles-based photographer and installation artist Ara Oshagan. Oshagan will exhibit work from several series that weave together the artist’s interests in diasporic possibility, afterlives of displacement, and (un)imagined futures.
The exhibition will run from Thursday, October 13 to December 2, 2002. The opening reception will take place on October 13 from 6 – 8 pm and will include the launch of Oshagan’s book “displaced.” Oshagan was included in the group show “The Road Home” at JKC gallery in 2021.
Ara Oshagan is interested in diasporic processes and afterlives of physical, cultural, and linguistic dislocations. The artist’s own history and identity is entangled in his work as he lives and works directly amongst disrupted and marginalized communities. In How The World Might Be, Oshagan employs photography, film and collage to present a layered and multi-disciplinary vision of “diasporic presence” that intertwines documentary with the constructed, text with image, fact with speculation, personal history with collective history. How The World Might Be entangles past-present-future and imagines the possibility of what was and what might or might not be.
Oshagan presents parts from his trilogy of photographic work that stretches across two continents—from Los Angeles to Armenia to Beirut—and encompasses over two decades, reflecting on diasporic memory, displacement, and the ambiguities of narrative. The recently published book, ‘displaced’, makes up the last part of the trilogy and is in collaboration with preeminent diaspora author Krikor Beledian.
Conceived in parallel to the trilogy, Oshagan also presents series of collage work and a film. The “Beirut Memory Project” reflects on the artist’s relationship to the Lebanese civil war—an intervention of violence and history that created a deeply personal and communal rupture. The series is an image-based speculation on healing this dislocation. Structurally, the work is seen from today while embedding in that matrix what came before: a construction that looks back across a divide, across decades of rupture, absence, war, memory, and loss.
“Shushi Portraits ” is a response to the re-colonization of Artsakh—a region in Armenia. Following the invasion of indigenous Armenian region of Artsakh by Azerbaijan in November 2020, Shushi, a historically Armenian town and the cultural center of the region became devoid of any indigenous inhabitants and occupied by a foreign state. The portraits are of indigenous residents of Shushi, now exiled. The work imagines an arc of invisible history re-connecting the ancient codex to the land and the embedded narrative re-contextualizing the deracinated present, keeping aloft a community, re-generating the indigenous moment.
Addressing similar issues of colonization, the “Artsakh Scrolls” collect the scattered fragments of the now-deracinated community of Artsakh Armenians into a panorama of life and possibility. The work is a digital collage comprised of cutouts extracted from Oshagan’s photographic series, “FatherLand”, from Artsakh before colonization. The work creates a historic arc from the 1915 Armenian Genocide to the one still unfolding today. Contextualized by this history of genocide and violence against the Armenian highlands, the work also speaks to a cyclical panorama of history that ebbs and flows where resistance and de-colonization are still possibilities. A short film accompanies the series.
“displaced” is published by Kehrer Verlag in Germany and will be launched at the exhibition opening. Krikor Beledian’s text is translated by Taline Voskeritchian and Christopher Millis and is the author’s first major work to appear in English. The project is supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation.
Live podcast recording during the reception.
