Review
“Empty Fields proposed that the gaps as violent ruptures exposed by the ABA archives, at the level of the database, present irretrievable histories that might be manifested as structural narratives. As this project was taking place within an institution in Istanbul, I was interested in the ways in which archival impossibilities could generate convergences between Armenian lost epistemologies and museo-archival and contemporary arts frameworks. In order to activate this approach, I invited the contemporary artist Fareed Armaly to create and establish the conceptual framework of the exhibition design. Armaly’s artistic practice works with a research-driven methodology that “draws guidelines out from selected roles and fields of inquiry and sets them into new correspondences ‘coercing constellations’” and with exhibitions that “emerge as an aggregate identity comprised of different ‘scripts’ at work.” In Empty Fields, our two roles formed an exhibition-making dialogue in which the museo-archival implications of the lost Museum of Anatolia College emerged tangibly within the existing cultural institution, SALT, as a discursive space. Rare archival materials, specimens, and new video testimonies assembled in a curatorial narrative chart a contemporary museological space. Through this perspective, another archival repository emerges: Manissadjian’s 1917 Catalogue of the Museum of Anatolia College.”
(Excerpt)