Diasporic Ruin-Images of Ani

Karen Jallatyan

Jasmin İhraç's highly evocative "Sahman-Grenze-Kuş," some 35 minutes long, consists of footage of the artist walking, moving, dancing in the ruins of Ani being shown on two connected large screens (a diptych) while real-life İhraç performs carefully choreographed moves with and without props in front of them. This staging is at times accompanied with audio, including the medieval Armenian spiritual song "Havun havun" by the 10-11th century Armenian mystic St. Gregory of Narek sung by İhraç herself. Early on in the performance, İhraç reads the opening lines of the Western Armenian poet Taniel Varoujan's poem "Among the Ruins of Ani" ("Անիի աւերակներուն մէջ"), published in the collection The Heart of the Race (Ցեղին սիրտը) in Constantinople in 1909.

Be it to weep, to kiss,
To evoke, to muse,
Be it to utter, onward, we enter.
Enter the vast city of a vast corpse,
Enter the Tomb of all Armenians…

Greetings, Ani, cemetery
Where rot the bones of a victorious Past.
Greetings, Ani, cradle,
Where beneath ruins, with black scorpion blood,
Our Future grows. (1)

Remarkably, İhraç does not read the word "Armenians" from Varoujan's poem, suggesting that her performance intends to displace the inherited identitarian boundaries of both the poem as well as the ruins of Ani. Nevertheless, İhraç reads the lines "Greetings, Ani, cemetery" and "Greetings, Ani, cradle" in Armenian, indicating her willingness to evoke the Armenian cultural production around the ruins of Ani in its linguistic specificity. In reading these opening lines, İhraç records and replays them, right before the footage from the ruins of Ani begins on the double screen. (2) Twice more in the performance, we hear a recording of İhraç reading from the poem "Among the Ruins of Ani."

Taniel Varoujan (1884-1915) belongs to the "aesthetic" generation of Western Armenian writers, a term coined by the towering writer, critic and teacher Hagop Oshagan (1883-1948) in his ten-volume Panorama of Western Armenian Literature, referring to the turn-of-the-century writers, including Oshagan himself, who not only strove to record the Armenian past as historians do, and bits and pieces of Armenian culture, as ethnographers do — to then relay them to the natives as a way to help them get in touch with their national identity at the verge of being lost —, but believed in the possibility of going a step further by striving to create authentic national art. (3) At the time of its publication, Varoujan's poem "Among the Ruins of Ani" was a major contribution to the movement that generated a national ruin-image of Ani. İhraç's evocation of the opening lines of Varoujan's poem at the beginning of her performance gives the poem a diasporic afterlife. By playing the recording of her reading of the poem, İhraç doubles the space of representation that invokes Varoujan's poem, inviting the spectator to reflect on the entanglements between memory and technologies of reproduction.

In addition to the double screen and the doubling of the space of the audio representation of Varoujan's "Among the Ruins of Ani," "Sahman-Grenze-Kuş" offers a double performance —the first recorded among the ruins of Ani and the second in the instances of its performance. The second, live performance interacts with the first by partial repetition of gestures in a carefully choreographed manner. In one instance, İhraç's live performance traces the edges of her body, as a way to invoke the motif of border, while Turkish Composer Zeynep Gedizlioğlu's song "Denge" (Balance), composed for and performed by the Armenian pianist Nare Karoyan, is playing. In another instance, İhraç begins with moves that invoke Armenian, Azeri and Turkish folk dance motifs, of women in particular, then starts whirling like a Sufi, invoking the Islamic layer in the memory and present of the ruins of Ani. Then İhraç performs what appear to be more original moves involving bird motives, under chirping sound. This is where part of the work's title "Kuş" in Turkish, is referred to. (4)

The two performances comprising İhraç's work are different in their status: one recorded on site and shown with the help of technology, the other performed live in front of the recorded footage and presumably before an audience. Setting up the two performances together forms a folded space of representation, allowing İhraç's work to not just represent a visit to and performance at the ruins of Ani but to reflect on the experience of such representation. First staged in Dusseldorf in 2017, and subsequently in Athens, Marseille, Ankara, Berlin (twice), Marrakesh and Berlin again, each performance is a singular instance of İhraç and the audience interacting with the footage of her at the ruins of Ani. The kind of memory of the ruins of Ani that is thus performed is situated at the limits of modern national ideologies with their lamentably exclusive identitarian logics. The multilingual title of the work — in Armenian (although with Latin letters), German and Turkish — compounds the liminal-experience of the double-performance. Ultimately, "Sahman-Grenze-Kuş" performs an inter-media and inter-local ruin-image that through embodied, affective, haptic and indexical, as well as of course visual and sonic, modes of evoking the ruins of Ani generates rare and unexpected diasporic configurations of its memory.

January, 2025


Notes:
1 İhraç reads from the translation by Nanor Kebranian published in Marc Nichanian, Mourning Philology: Art and Religion at the Margins of the Ottoman Empire, trans. G.M. Goshgarian and Jeff Fort (Fordham University Press, New York, 2014), 302-308.
2 İhraç also plays a recording of her singing. Moreover, in a correspondence with me, İhraç informs that birds are particularly important to her when it comes to the ruins of Ani since they "trespass every border so effortlessly." She adds that the bird motives in the last dance reference Kung Fu "in which we find several forms with birds." Correspondence date: December 30, 2024.
3 See on this topic Nichanian's definitive work Mourning Philology.
4 Can the motif of chirping birds be also an echo of another performance at the ruins of Ani, the 2015 work "The Silence of Ani" by Francis Alÿs?