Undoing Denials at the Venice Biennale’s Armenian Pavilion

Neery Melkonian

 

Neery Melkonian, a New York-based art curator and scholar, passed away on July 2, 2016, after battling cancer. She was a gifted scholar with a keen eye for different manifestations of Armenian contemporary art. In her memory, we reproduce the following essay, first published in the catalogue for Armenity, which accompanied the Armenian pavilion of the same name at the 2015 Venice Biennale. The Armenity exhibition won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the Biennale last year.

Meline Toumani, the Armenian Genocide and the Politics of Appeasement

Christopher Atamian

 

Meline Toumani's puzzling and sometimes maddening first book There Was and There Was Not: A Journey Through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia and Beyond purports to analyze the hatred still separating Armenians and Turks on the eve of the one hundredth commemoration of the Armenian Genocide. The biggest problem with the exposé lies perhaps in Toumani's underlying assumptions, i.e. that Armenians and Turks all hate each other and in equating victim and perpetrator. Toumani is usually a fluid writer, but here she gets lost in an often muddled and contradictory analysis.