Veronika Babayan
artistic research - autobiographical - community - conceptual - crossover - decolonization - Diaspora - education - history - installation - international - publication
Veronika Babayan uses an auto-ethnographic approach in the adaptation of early feminist practices of preservation in relation to the concepts of collective memory, intergenerational trauma and diasporic identity. A large part of her work revolves around fruit leather making - a recipe through which stories of deracination, migration and survival of the Armenian women have been passed on intergenerationally and transnationally. In this light, Babayan is instrumentalizing the recipe into a collective political subjectivity, a mnemonic device, and a transmission vessel of oral histories. In doing so, her work depicts the brutal and visceral characteristics of apparently fragile materials that represent both nurturance and resistance.