Exhibit: Repatriation As Ramification Of The Armenian Genocide

EXHIBIT: REPATRIATION AS RAMIFICATION OF THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

Opening Reception, April 18, 2013,
5PM-8PM

Audio-Visual Presentation by Artist 6PM

Repatriation as Ramification of the Genocide is the second half
of the inaugural exhibition of paintings and drawings by Hazel
Antaramian-Hofman. The artwork is based on over two years of historical
and ethnographic study, including personal interviews with survivors
of the Great Repatriation to Soviet Armenia. To realize a collective
experience, the artist connects her art to her research documentation
in a multi-media presentation.

Antaramian-Hofman’s new work is in response to the stories and
photographs that she has collected during her visits with Armenian
repatriates. These repatriates left such Diasporan countries as
France, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and the United States to only
“return” to an unknown Armenian homeland soon after the end of World
War II. The art also responds to her own history as the daughter of
two repatriates who lived their early formative years under Stalin.

As the first collection in a series of works-in-progress,
Antaramian-Hofman’s art speaks to the paradox of historical
circumstance and reoccuring themes of a displaced people longing
for closure.

The template for her mixed media paintings includes the artistic
paradigm of poster art and iconic cultural images, and archival
documents as selected testimony of socio-political ideology. Her
drawings reveal segmented aspects of the repatriate “body,” in
particular, children of genocide victims and their Diaspora-born
children, all successively fragmented by politics, social issues,
and sentimentality.

Artist Statement

I converse with each individual piece of artwork during the creative
process. Sometimes, the conversation takes me places where I never
imagined going. This is what makes the whole artistic experience
a wonder.

Concepts such as homeland, refugees, and immigration are an intrinsic
part of my work. What interests me is the pursuit of homeland,
and disparate cultural and ideological underpinnings of the human
condition. I want to speak to universal issues concerning the
anthropological connection to the conception of cultural symbols as
an extension of the natural landscape.

The first body of my mixed media paintings and representational
drawings in, Repatriation and Deception, is an interpretive reaction
to the socio-historic period of the post-WWII repatriation to Soviet
Armenia. The second part of the show, which opens on April 18, 2013,
exhibits additional artwork and broadens the scope of the dialogue
regarding the history of the twentieth-century repatriation to Soviet
Armenia in Repatriation as Ramification of the Genocide. Both in
my artwork and my lecture presentation, I connect the two historic
events with photographs and personal stories of genocide survivors
who in-turn became repatriates.

Show runs from March to June 2013 (new extended date)

Armenian Museum of Fresno, Exhibition Hall University of California
Center of Fresno 550 East Shaw Ave.

Fresno, CA 93710

Free Admission and Parking

Exhibition Hall Hours: Monday – Friday 9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

Saturday 9:00 a.m. – 11:00 p.m.

Funding for this Exhibition has been provided by the Armenian
Museum of Fresno, The Puffin Foundation, Ltd., and The
Bertha and John Garabedian Charitable Foundation About Show

For more on the Repatriation Art and Ethnographic Project visit:

To participate in the project: contact the artist at
[email protected]