There Was and Was Not (2023-2024)
My brother and I lie belly-down on overlapping rugs at the foot of his green velvet chair. With our chins propped in our palms, we watch his large hands move about as he speaks.
“There was, and was not…”
These are the words that begin our grandfather’s tales, transporting us to ancient worlds full of laughing fish and nightingales that sing one thousand songs.
Beyond his shrinking frame there is our grandmother, Yiayia, washing dishes with her back to us. Her stories were ones we'd only hear in the morning at the precipice of sleep, as she sat at the edge of our bed with her sisters speaking in their secret language: a medley of Greek, Armenian, and Turkish. Tales not of an ancient world, but of an old country—one that now exists only in memory.
The stories of her childhood were not as accessible as our grandfather’s. I think that’s what drew us in—the yearning to know more, the excitement we felt when we got her to open up and share her memories with us. Many times, they spoke of a place and a people that no longer existed in their original context. More often than not, they were inconsistent and filled with gaps. Over the years, we heard many renditions of the same stories, with details that changed slightly: Was she walking with her sheep, or was she playing soccer when she found the body of the missing dentist from her village? It became clear to us how the traumatic effects of war and displacement had created holes in her memory. Rather than trying to fill these gaps, I found myself drawn to the notion of absence as a form of presence.
There Was and Was Not (2023–2024) is a visual exploration of the complex relationship between my grandmother and her memories, and how those memories take tangible form through objects—specifically, her family photo albums. By digitally manipulating scans of archival images, I removed elements and figures from her photographs, mirroring the way details have faded and become distorted in her own recollections. This process created an intermediary space between the real and the spectral, illustrating both the long-term psychological effects of war and displacement on memory, and how, despite my family’s physical absence, their memories continue to disrupt and haunt the contemporary landscapes from which they were forcibly removed.
This work was greatly influenced by Ibtisam Azem's The Book of Disappearance and Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory, "the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before".
