Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how diasporic artists re-contextualise handmade textiles by linking them to themes of home, exile, and the ongoing effects of the Armenian Genocide and their role in memory, activism, and identity formation.

Paper long abstract:

Handmade textiles serve as tactile media of memory and identity, especially within diasporic contexts. Used, exhibited, celebrated or forgotten, these everyday objects carry sensory and affective meanings that contribute to our understanding of concepts such as home, exile and nation. This paper aims bringing together different perspectives from art, history and anthropology to explore ways in which handmade textiles are recontextualised by diasporic artists within and beyond contemporary global art scene. By conceptualising the Armenian Genocide not as a singular event confined to the Ottoman Empire during a particular period in the twentieth century, but as an ongoing process with persistent afterlives in modern Turkey, Armenia and the diaspora, this paper engages with new materialist research on the afterlives of violence, dispossession, and displacement. Shifting the focus to the role of personal objects in actively materialising memory in the context of the genocide's aftermath, this paper aims to go beyond documenting the survival and adaptation of these objects or artefacts as ruins, but instead examines the more intimate, mundane and affective processes they evoke, as well as their potential to shape contemporary politics and activism.

personal objects, memory, diasporic art, afterlives of violence,