Review
“To design Empty Fields, Hovhannisyan commissioned and collaborated with Arab-American artist and curator Fareed Armaly.[23] Armaly’s exhibition-making practices have focused on exploring the sociopolitical context of the displayed materials through exhibition design, in particular the liberal use of visual guiding and framing systems and complex layouts, as well as the use of text (inscribed on the walls or provided in publications), to frame specific materials and produce divergent narratives.[24] In producing Empty Fields, Armaly faced a singular challenge: to generate a meaning from the archive’s content and the ancillary materials that would take into account the disappearance of Anatolia College’s natural science museum (see fig. 6) due to the Armenian genocide—a disappearance made legible in gaps in the body of the archive.”
[...]
“By revealing these archival silences, Empty Fields materially embodied within its design its animating questions, such as whether destroyed and missing records can transmit social narratives across time and space, as well as whether we can discern in these silences the actions of gatekeepers denying persecuted groups access to their own social memory and history. Indeed, understood in this framework, the curatorial and exhibition-making work of Hovhannisyan and Armaly (re)produced materially the archival silences and re-inscribed the silenced voices.”
(Excerpt)