Relics

#RELICS

Relics features 50 suspended, transparent banners with digitally printed images of relic-objects provided by museums, churches, private family collections, archives, and books from Armenian communities in Los Angeles, Fresno, New York City, Boston, Berlin, Moscow, Artsakh and Armenia. This room brings together a plurality of memory objects that reflect loss and belonging from around the globe into a single space—a movement from dispersion to an imagined possibility and moment of unity. Most of the objects depicted here were saved, preserved, and passed down to family members or museums by women. 

An object becomes a relic not just because it has historical or sentimental value, but because of its story. A relic is all that is left of something in the present, now gone—an object, a custom, a belief, a person or people. Relics are often outmoded, and do not hold the same relationship to the present, as they one day may have. A relic is disjunct; it is out of time. In the present, a relic has no time. Floating from the ceiling on white transparent sheets, images of relics are juxtaposed, overlapped, layered; they fall as if creating a labyrinth in the air, giving a gentle texture to the space that contrasts the horrors they’ve witnessed, and forcing the eye to look past one banner in order to see the next. While these relics may not seem related any longer to the present, as they move together, they create a story, a relationality. That relationality is also extended outward: over some of these Armenian image-relics are relic-drawings by non-Armenian artists, all of whom have added their own memories of loss to the Armenian ones. In this gesture, the feeling of loss from trauma is not hierarchized, while at the same time, the addition of these drawings over the Armenian ones reminds us that one trauma left unacknowledged only leads to more like it.