Young artist's reunited ropes show Turks, Armenians as inseparable

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

One woman from the Armenian diaspora has been creating art to break taboos, and is showing her work in Istanbul at the BM Suma Han-Contemporary Art Center. 'I am an inseparable part of this land,' says the artist, Silvina Der MeguerditchianSilvina Der Meguerditchian's exhibition at BM Suma Han-Contemporary Art Center.

A young Armenian artist from Buenos Aires, but with roots in Anatolia, is displaying her taboo-breaking art at the BM Suma Han-Contemporary Art Center in Istanbul’s Karaköy neighborhood through March 4.

Silvina Der Meguerditchian, a promising artist in the field of modern art, came from her home in Berlin to Istanbul for the exhibition, which seems to have left its mark on this year’s art agenda.

Speaking to the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review, Der Meguerditchian described the aim of her exhibition, saying, “With this exhibition, I wanted to express that I am an inseparable part of this land.” She said the iron curtain between the Turkish and Armenian people should be removed, adding, “We need to establish dialogue and take steps toward the future.”

Stating her happiness for opening such an exhibition in Turkey, Der Meguerditchian said, “As an artist from the [Armenian] diaspora, if I can freely organize such an exhibit here without denying the events in the past; this is an important step for Turkey.”

Turkish family saves her grandmother

In the entrance of the exhibition hall, visitors see historic photos placed in weavings. The photos in the exhibit tell the life of Der Meguerditchian’s grandmothers and grandfathers in Anatolia. The artist named the exhibition “Aferin Yavrum” (Well done honey), referring to her grandmother.

Der Meguerditchian said her grandmother taught her to knit when she was a little child. “When I did it well, my grandmother used to tell me ‘Well done honey’ in Turkish. This is why I named the exhibition this.”

Dedicating the exhibition to the memory of her grandmother, Der Meguerditchian said, “Wherever she is in the universe, I know that she sees me and tells me ‘Well done honey’ since I came to the land where I belong and opened this exhibition – even if I can’t hear her.”

She said until the end of her life, her grandmother had never forgotten a family that saved her from death, adding: “My grandmother lost all members of her family in 1915, and a Turkish family saved her from death. To not forget her identity, my grandmother wrote the names of all family members on a piece of paper and hid it. She just barely found her sister, whom she thought was dead, 50 years later, sometime before her death.”

Berlin was the breaking point

Der Meguerditchian grew up in a community of Armenians in Buenos Aires. She said she stayed away from Turks, but the first break through was when she went to Berlin in 1986. “I was 18 and knew nobody in Berlin. I felt lonely. I suddenly saw a kebab house on the street, and its signboard was Turkish. I entered there without any hesitation,” she said.

Sometime later, Der Meguerditchian returned to her family in Buenos Aires. “I wanted to get the experience with Turks like I always heard about from others,” she said, adding that she returned to Berlin at the age of 20. Der Meguerditchian took the first step to confront herself when her family came to visit her in Berlin. “My father and mother were watching Turkish television in Berlin. They were making Turkish friends when they went outside. I started asking myself questions when I saw this,” she said, adding that she made many Turkish friends during that period.

After all these events, she came to Istanbul for the first time in 2005 and defined the city as “Love that can never be given up.”

Her son’s music teacher is a Turk

Der Meguerditchian said she found a Turkish teacher to teach the Turkish instrument kanun to her 6-year-old son Avedis. She said it was a hard decision for her, adding: “To find myself, I seek answers to my questions and try to get rid of my prejudices. This is a difficult process. Even though it was weird for me that a Turk taught lessons to my son at first, I perceived that it would be a big step for me to remove my prejudices.”



The most beautiful and emotional room of the exhibition is the one where tens of meters of ropes fall from the walls reuniting on the ground. Talking about this work titled “You-Me,” Der Meguerditchian concluded by saying, “Here, I tried to explain how peoples of both countries have become a whole throughout hundreds of years and cannot be separated.”



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About the artist

Der Meguerditchian, 37, lives in Berlin and is among the world’s most promising names in the field of contemporary art. Earning awards from many European countries, particularly Germany, she has artwork in many significant modern art collections in Argentina, Armenia, Portugal and the United States. She focuses on the concepts of identity and memory in her works.