Aylin Vartanyan

And perhaps one of the most striking symbols of this blindness is the aircraft that came to be known as the ‘Lolita Express.’ How could so many powerful adults, from business figures to politicians, from academics to scientists, board an aircraft carrying this name without question? A plane named after a young girl became a chilling symbol of how normalized this regime of gaze had become.

Photographs showing Armenian women with long, braided hair were mostly taken before 1915. After that date, in cities such as Aleppo, Beirut, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cyprus, Syros, Athens, Piraeus, and elsewhere, surviving Armenian women, orphans and widows alike, appear with their hair cut short or completely shaved. The hair of children, in particular, was often shaven off. Cutting the hair of women and young girls was seen as a precaution against an invisible threat.

What I remember most vividly about my grandma Koharig is her restlessness and her extraordinary talent for preparing food. She could bring together whatever was available at home and make a delicious meal. She gave meaning to her life by constantly cooking and feeding her loved ones (sometimes forcefully). Maybe that was her way of telling the family stories she couldn't put into words. Ursula K. Le Guin, in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, opened a critical window onto the notion of the hero in literature. Instead of heroic narratives that often devolve into destructive power over time, she proposed carrier narratives. She reminded us that the first cultural tool wasn’t a weapon for killing, but a bag used to carry and preserve. This view, supported by anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher, places survival, nourishment, and transformation at the center of narrative.

Artist photographer Silva Bingaz’s exhibition, Opus 3c, opened on February 17 at Öktem Aykut Art Gallery (İstanbul) . Bingaz’s photography goes beyond the conventional act of “taking a photograph” (capturing an image and taking it away). Through her predominantly black-and-white frames, she translates the divine moment of encounter between images and the gaze into an infinite narrative in the most intimate way possible. Drawing from her new exhibition, we spoke with Bingaz about the processes of documenting the acts of “giving birth; and the efforts to record the act of bringing into existence, the act that remains unrecorded and rather traditionally unknown”

There is a reason why Sarkis' installations are called 'theatrum mundi' [world theatre]. Sarkis, who has an enormous archive, is an artist who re-stages his old and recent works along with found objects by bringing them together as if they were living beings.

Ernaux's first years of writing coincide with the times when the women in our family could not write. We should also remember the reality that writing was interrupted for Armenian women, and that their priorities were confined to domestic and extra-domestic labor to sustain their families and themselves.

Lang's selection of photographs traces the Armenian heritage in Turkey, including the ruins of churches, houses and monasteries, hybrid structures that emerge from the combination of two incompatible architectural styles of two different eras, and natural environments with an unsettling tranquility. The first question I asked myself, especially when I first saw the photographs of Armenian heritage, was why my knowledge of the stories carried by these ruined architectural structures frozen in time was so limited.

Parrhesia has been and continues to be a place where we, as Armenian women, share intellectual exchanges as well as issues of womanhood, friendship, mourning and melancholy. And we are trying to make this impossible existence possible by multiplying our own words, artistic productions and research. We are also happy that we will reach out to the readers and share our activities in this space that Agos newspaper provided us with every fortnight.