Peeling the Onion

Visual Reminders

May 10 - June 29

Anoushka Bhalla – Marsha Nouritza Odabashian
Adrienne Der Marderosian – Kevork Mourad

Opening Reception: Friday, May 10, 6-8pm
368 Broadway, Suite 409, New York, NY
Please RSVP: info@elzakayal.com

About


Elza Kayal Gallery is pleased to present “Peeling the Onions”, a group show of four extraordinary  artists. The selected works present personal responses to a tragic legacy of our collective past.

Geopolitical events, both historic and current, led to an urge to showcase artworks that are reminders of catastrophic conditions, and ask the audience to have a moment of contemplation. The exhibited works, besides their remarkable aesthetic and technical properties, have a profound effect on the viewer. They do not serve as any kind of political statement, but a  humanitarian one. The artworks are visual research on the aftermath of genocides and wars of ancestors, and the consequent transgenerational traumas. The artists address memory, impermanence, forced displacement, vulnerability of civilians, and the struggle for survival on the edge of man-created disasters through a variety of poetic visual forms. 

The participating artists represent different generations. Three of them are descendents of Armenian genocide survivors, and one artist is from Indian heritage with a complex family history. The tradition of oral storytelling of personal and collective traumas are the returning subject of their oeuvre. The works provoke self-reflection on solidarity, fears, belonging, endurance in crisis, and the ethical practices on what we can control in the midst of devastations that are ripping through our world.

All our ancestors and all future generations are present in us all the time. Happiness is not an individual matter. As long as the ancestors in us are still suffering we can’t be happy, and we will transmit their suffering to our children and their children. 

– Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Walk

Artists


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.