The Armenian Genocide or Aghet (Armenian for catastrophe) took place in the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I. Armenians, a Christian ethnic minority, had lived in the Ottoman Empire for centuries with alternating phases of relatively peaceful coexistence and discriminatory oppression. During World War I, the Young Turk government accused Armenians of siding with the empire’s enemies, such as Russia, seizing a pretext for their persecution. On 24 April 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested and executed hundreds of Armenian intellectuals and leaders in Constantinople (now Istanbul), marking the start of the genocide. Armenians were deported and sent on death marches through the Syrian Desert without food, water, or shelter. Along the way, countless Armenians were massacred, while others died from starvation, disease, or exhaustion. It is estimated that 1,2 to 1,5 million Armenians were killed during this period. Survivors were scattered around the world, creating a vast Armenian diaspora that keeps the memory of the genocide alive. 

On this evening, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) commemorates the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Through art, dialogue, and film, the gathering honours the memory of the 1,5 million Armenian lives lost and addresses the enduring repercussions of these years. With a considerable Armenian diaspora in Germany, specifically in Berlin and Cologne, the programme aims to foster an understanding and dialogue, standing up against all forms of genocide denial and injustice. It is open to all those who seek to reflect, learn, and remember. 

The programme is specifically centered around the experiences of Armenian women. During the deportations, the Ottoman authorities targeted women and children for assimilation and reproduction, and forced them to convert to Islam. These untold stories remain tabooed in contemporary Turkish society, often merely uncovered through revelations by chance, such as discovering an Armenian heritage within one’s family. Highlighting voices often overlooked or marginalized in hegemonic historiography, the programme seeks to create a nuanced narrative of the Armenian experience, thus connecting it with broader global conversations on memory, identity, and the role of the arts in addressing historical trauma.

 

18:30
Performative Gesture
Angie Stardust Foyer

Silence
Mehtap Baydu

The phenomenon of silence invisibly pervades the fabric of human interaction, be it in small groups, broad social strata, political arenas, or within minorities and gender groups. At first glance, silence may appear neutral, but at a closer glance it often turns out to be a complex and multi-layered construct that involves far more than the mere absence of words. It becomes particularly explosive when silence begins to give the impression of apparent unanimity, a deceptive surface of harmony beneath which bubbles a sea of unspoken opinions, suppressed ideas, and unlived identities.

 

19:15
Film Screenings
Safi Faye Hall

Armat
D: Élodie Dermange, 2022, Switzerland, DCP, 11' 37", French with English subtitles

In this short animation film, Élodie tries to find out more about her Armenian origins. She interviews her father, her uncle, her great aunt, and discovers a harsh history where violence and the inability to express love are passed down from generation to generation.

 

Sweet Home Adana
D: Nagehan Uskan, 2024, Türkiye, Portugal, Italy, DCP, 21', Turkish, Armenian with Turkish and English subtitles
Followed by a Q&A with the director

This subjective documentary tells the journey towards the home of Marie from Adana, an Armenian forcibly converted to Islam. It’s a story of searching for roots and not finding them. From Adana's old Armenian memory sites to the diplomatic archives of Nantes (France) and to the disruptive searches of treasure hunters, Sweet Home Adana brings together the fragments related to different aspects of denial and forgetting.

 

20:15
Panel Discussion
Safi Faye Hall

Alice von Bieberstein, Nazan Maksudyan, Silvina Der Meguerditchian, moderated by Veronika Zablotsky 

Focusing on the stories of women, often dismissed by official historiography, the panel reflects upon the traumatic experiences of many Armenian women during and after the genocide. Political anthropologist Alice von Bieberstein, whose work circles around the challenge of engaging ethnographically with the Armenian genocide as a transnational event, historian Nazan Maksudyan, whose research focuses on children and youth, gender and sexuality, exile and migration, sound and media in the late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, and artist Silvina Der Meguerditchian, who is the granddaughter of Armenian immigrants from Argentina, share their intellectual, artistic, and activist perspectives on individual and collective histories of Armenian women and connect them to broader issues of remembrance, identity, and marginalization. Moderated by political theorist Veronika Zablotsky, who works on issues of diaspora and migration with a special focus on the global Armenian displacement, the panel asks how individual and collective testimony and performance can establish new forms of cultural memory and facilitate social cohesion.

 

21:45
Closing Gathering and Music Performance
Angie Stardust Foyer

Poems and Lullabies of the Post-Nostalgic
Music performance by Marie Yevkiné Tirard

The programme closes with an informal gathering and a musical performance by Marie Yevkiné Tirard. Marie’s ancestors survived the Armenian genocide of 1915. Marie found a book of poems that her maternal great-grandmother Yevkiné Diarian wrote in the 1930s, which was conserved in her family as a sort of silent relic. She decided to translate these poems, written in a threatened language (Western Armenian, Turkish, and dialect), and discovered all the emotions of despair, nostalgia, and loss that Yevkiné could never express during her lifetime, but yet, wanted to share with her descendants. In order to give a voice to her ancestor, Marie creates music from her words. Embodying the figure of the ashik, a nomadic troubadour who mixed poetry, narration, and music, she tells the stories of her ancestors. She plays the saz, the instrument of the troubadour, combining it with electronics and recordings of ambient sounds and traditional instruments.