In Grand Park exhibit, a genocide’s survivors
Vahida Dekmejian didn’t want to remember. Living in her garage apartment in Pasadena, she preferred to cook. Lahmacun — Armenian pizza — was one of her specialties. She taught the recipe to her children and left the remembering to them.
“Unless asked, she didn’t like to open up,” said her granddaughter Paulette Geragos. “It was a brutal story. She saw a lot of violent death.”
Sitting on a bench in downtown’s Grand Park, Geragos looked across the terrace at a large portrait of Dekmejian, one of 45 blackand-white photographs on display through Sunday, each showing a survivor of the Armenian genocide.
“There is a lot of determination in her eyes,” said Geragos, “as well as melancholy.”
The exhibit, the first outdoor art installation for Grand Park, was created by Ara Oshagan and Levon Parian, who for 20 years have been taking photographs and collecting the stories of Armenian survivors. The project, “iwitness,” opened last month to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the genocide.
Geragos, 52, was joined by her parents and other family members for a generational photograph with their beloved medz mayr, who died in 2005 at 103.
Born in Aintab in what was then the Ottoman Empire, Dekmejian saw the deportations, the hunger and the killing wreaked upon Armenians by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. She was 13 at the time.
After 1915, Dekmejian moved to Aleppo in modernday Syria, where she made sure that her family left the Middle East and relocated to the United States. She emigrated in the 1950s.
“She never said, ‘Never forget,’ ” Geragos recounted. “She never asked us to carry on her legacy. It was implicit.”
Dekmejian’s expression — neither recriminating nor judgmental — is mirrored in the other faces, a visual chorus of dignity and acceptance in spite of what they saw and experienced.
Mounted on trapezoidal prisms nearly 7 feet tall, their faces are etched by time: hair gray and wispy, eyes clouded by cataracts, beards stubbly, earrings ele-
gant.
Names are marked by the year and place of their birth. Phrases from their lives are printed beside them.
Sandstorms uncovered bones everywhere in Meskeneh where thousands of Armenians were buried.
The last thing my father did was to give my mother his pocket watch.
Their statements tell tales of horror and hope, of executions and violations, of graves dug by hand and of unlikely escapes.
Out of deadly fear, we stopped being Armenian. You never survive from a genocide.
Between 1915 and 1917, an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed on the orders of the Ottoman government.
The idea for the project came to Oshagan after attending an event for the 80th anniversary of the genocide.
“There were 80 survivors there,” he said, “and I re- member thinking, ‘They’re so fragile. Tomorrow they’re going to disappear.’ ”
Oshagan and Parian began photographing and collecting the oral histories of these men and women. Speaking to The Times in 1999, Parian described how the survivors had gotten on with their lives, raising children and making good in their new countries.
“But the guilt of it, the unfinished sorrows,” he added, “are a huge wound opened in the Armenian psyche, and it’s far from healed.”
Three years ago, Oshagan and Parian conceived of this project, large prisms with faces wrapping the corners, no right angles. Its design was meant to convey a world out of balance, Oshagan said.
“These multiple eyes,” he added, “they are transferring what they witnessed to us. We’ve become the next generation to remember.”
As Oshagan and Parian photographed gathering families — and took a group portrait of all the families who had come out today to stand beside the portraits of their parent, grandparent, great-grandparent — they talked about the prospect of taking the installation to San Francisco, New York and even Istanbul.
“Can you imagine that?” Oshagan said. “Twenty years ago this would have been completely out of the question.”