Atrocity on exhibit in ‘Armenia: An Open Wound’
Community outreach director Tigranna Zakaryan, with the Armenian American Museum, walks through a door into a desert area called Deir ez-Zor at “Armenia: An Open Wound” at the Brand Library and Art Center in Glendale on Monday, April 18, 2016.
Glendale city officials and community leaders recently unveiled an exhibition at the Brand Library and Art Center that explores the history of the Armenian people as well as the context and aftermath of the Armenian Genocide.
“Armenia: An Open Wound,” which opened Saturday to a crowd of about 500 attendees, runs Tuesdays through Saturdays until June 11. Admission is free.
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The exhibition — presented by the city’s Library, Arts and Culture Department in partnership with the Armenian American Museum — takes between 30 to 45 minutes to walk through. It comes to Glendale after a one-year run in Mexico City’s Museum of Memory and Tolerance, where it was created.
Visitors start “Armenia: An Open Wound” in a room dedicated to the history and origins of Armenia. It includes a scale replica of Ani, a medieval Armenian community, now in ruins, in present-day Turkey.
The second area delves into the atrocities, including targeted massacres, committed against the Armenian people from approximately 1821 to 1918.
The subsequent section, called the Blood and Sand Memorial, includes a life-size photo of Tsitsernakaberd, an Armenian Genocide memorial erected in Yerevan. Hundreds of flowers were placed in front of the Tsitsernakaberd photo Saturday.
The center of the photo has also been cut out, allowing visitors to pass through it and into a separate room behind that transports them into the Deir ez-Zor desert in Syria. The room, which has dirt on the ground, features 360-degree photos of the barren landscape. Playing in the background is music featuring the duduk, an Armenian woodwind instrument.
Zaven Kazazian and Tigranna Zakaryan point to a small child in a photograph that they said was recognized by a museum visitor to Mexico City’s Museum of Memory and Tolerance, where the exhibit “Armenia: An Open Wound” ran for a year before coming to Glendale.
The Deir ez-Zor scene commemorates and symbolizes the harsh journeys imposed upon the Armenian people, who were forced to leave their ancestral homeland, organizers say. It also shows how isolated they became and even where they died, hence the name “blood and sand,” said Tigranna Zakaryan, community outreach director for the Armenian American Museum.
“Armenia: An Open Wound “ will have personal meaning to almost every Armenian, added Zaven Kazazian, a member of the museum’s executive committee. Recalling the exhibition’s name, he said that chapter in Armenia’s history is still an “open wound” because the Turks have never admitted “that they committed these atrocities.”
Cathy Billings, senior library, arts and culture supervisor for the Brand Library, said the galleries have never shown an exhibition of such scale before. Walls had to be built quickly to create the narrative path in time for the opening on Saturday.
“It’s totally new for us,” she said.
“Armenia: An Open Wound” includes free special events on particular topics, the first of which will be from 7 to 9:30 p.m. on Thursday. Titled “Global Realities, Local Perspectives,” it will feature refugee-rights professionals talking about humanitarian assistance.
For more information about the exhibition, visit www.armenianamericanmuseum.org or call the Brand Library at (818) 548-2051.
The Brand Library and Art Center is located at 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale.
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Bradley Zint, bradley.zint@latimes.com
Twitter: @BradleyZint
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