Ara Oshagan Exhibit ‘Disrupted, Borders’ Connects Fragments of Armenian World

The question of identity and in particular “multiple identities” is a theme. “I like to think of the identities as stacked, in a non-hierarchical way, where all identifies are there commensurate to each other. At any one moment you could be in one identity or another,” he explained.

To bring even more of his Armenian heritage into the exhibit, one wall is painted the crimson color that in nature is from a Cochineal insect, called Vordan Karmir, native to Armenia.

Also prominent in the exhibit is a series of hanging scrolls, “Hmayils,” of which the museum has several examples, in which Oshagan has inserted photos he has taken.

It is, he said, “the medieval form of outsider art,” he said, as people loved them but the church didn’t. “People used to commission them by scribes,” he said. “When church members found these scrolls, they would immediately burn them. These talismanic, magical attempts to ward off evil connect me with the hundreds of years of history,” he said. “I made them contemporary by adding my own images.”

In the medieval times, people would carry them for their travels. “I carry them with me sometimes myself,” he said. He connects it with the “right of return” to Western Armenia and now Shushi.

Beirut and Los Angeles

Beirut is special to Oshagan, as it is his city of birth. He moved from Beirut to Los Angeles with his family at age 10, when the war began. The aftershocks of that war permeated his life.

“We didn’t see war. Right when the war began, my father was able to get visas and we left,” he said. They moved to the US, but not Los Angeles. Instead, they went to Wisconsin and Tennessee first. Eventually, his parents separated.

“This kind of multiple layered moves for me physically, emotionally, familially, was a huge rupture in my life. Going back there and photographing there was dealing with a huge rupture that happened very early in my life. They never go away,” he said. “In fact, they multiply.”

He started going back to Beirut in 2014. “I lived in Bourj Hamoud and walk around in the same area, go to the same places again and again and again” in an effort to “make the camera invisible.”

“I did a book, collaborating with my father [poet Vahe Oshagan] titled Fatherland,” he said.

“My LA work or the work in Beirut, are very different,” he said. In Beirut, he said, he focused on Bourj Hamoud and Ainjar. “I had my camera and engaged in the life there … to become part of the way they live.”

Most of the LA and Beirut photos were not posed, but were candids, presenting slices of life there.

“Compositionally it’s really important for me the way I compose the images in that work. A lot of the images are layered and multiple things are happening,” he said. “The compositions of my work have these multiple layers and that all speaks to diasporic identity, and connects to who I am and how I articulate that.”

Spending time there as an adult changed his perception of Beirut. “Before 2014, Beirut was a different place for me. After 2014, after I went there and did this book, it’s a different place for me,” he said.

In one part of the exhibit, he creates new composition of photos which are half from Beirut and half from Los Angeles.

“When you show them together, there is a conversation that happens between them. There is an entanglement between Beirut and LA are connected. Artsakh and Beirut are connected. Medieval manuscripts  and women on a boat on Big Bear Lake are connected. My grandfathers’ handwriting is connected to the medieval scribe Toros Roslin’s handwriting,” he noted.

“There is all this connectivity that happens when you are able to show multiple series together because in my mind they are all connected. Space, time, geographies, borders, entanglements are all really important to me,” he said.

His book of photographs of Beirut, Displaced, is on sale at the museum, as is Fatherland.

The exhibit was originally shown at the Tufenkian Fine Arts Gallery in Glendale, and then at Stockton University in New Jersey. The curator there, Ryan Casey, is also curating it for the Armenian Museum. This current exhibit is an expanded version.

Next for him are projects involving prisons, as well as Central Valley and Korea. The latter is “another border” that you can’t cross. “Korea is the only country divided into two,” he said. “There is a lot of connectivity for me.”

He also plans to go to Turkey, as part of the Diaspora experience, from where his grandparents hailed, and to find Armenians there.

This exhibition has been sponsored by Michele M. Kolligian in memory of Haig Der Manuelian.

To learn more about the exhibit, visit www.armenianmuseum.org. To learn more about Oshagan and his exhibits and books, visit www.araoshagan.net.