Anoushka Bhalla grew up in India, and her works are influenced by her family stories in relation to the aftermath of the British Colonial Empire’s hegemony in the region. The stories loom with memories of ancestral violence, forced labor and slavery. The works are abstract and figurative, deriving images from manuscripts, photographic documentations from British historic archives. Anoushka uses primordial elements like terracotta, ash and carbon, symbolizing history and the passage of time. The imagery in her work addresses portraits of colonial figures, landscapes in the wake of destruction and wounds, evoking the unconsciousness of the collective past.

Marsha Nouritza Odabashian’s onion-stain paintings float between reality and the world of imaginations. A traditional technique used by Armenians to stain Easter eggs is a source of inspiration. Boiled onion skin disintegrates into semi-solids and liquid, in shades red, red-orange and maroon. Then she throws, drops and paints the mixture onto the canvas, paper or compressed cellulose sponge. Each result is unique as the artist teases them into humans and animals, in an indefinable, uncertain landscape. While humor and absurdity is often present, the compositions invoke alertness, life and death, decay and struggle for survival. The works in this show conceived and completed after Odabashian’s return from a trip to her ancestral homeland with a group of art historians. 

Adrienne Der Marderosian explores themes of memory, gender and identity through different mediums. Her collages, and digital photos carry lonely, ghost-like figures, wandering back from the past, and their haunting presence serves as warning reminders. The desperate female figures, like flashbacks of atrocities on women, hit the viewer from the elegantly printed digital photos that are mounted on dibond. On her maps in “Tattoo Trails”, the characters in heavy coats are on their uncertain journey, refugees who are trying to navigate unknown landscapes. The images are references to her family history during the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when her grandparents were forced to flee their homelands for the Middle East and eventually settle in the West.

Kevork Mourad is born in Qamishli, Syria, descendent of Armenian survivors. His family escaped the genocide during the Ottoman Empire, and now his adopted country has been raged by years of civil war. Kevork’s works are impressionistic reflections on war and on its aftermath, and the historic inheritances of his people. His works raise awareness of the subsequent refugee crisis. The works are metaphors for any victim of disaster, seeking his or her way out. Mourad’s color palette became very minimal in recent years. His formal choices forcefully demonstrate the endlessness of the situation. His dynamic drawings, sculptures, installations and cross-disciplinary collaborative performances often carry intricate, layered architectural images that are fragments of the artist’s childhood memories from Syria and Armenia. Dramatically layered cotton-fabric constructions have lately become a frequent building material of his narratives.