USC INSTITUTE OF ARMENIAN STUDIES
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California, USA
Contact: Syuzanna Petrosyan, Associate Director
[email protected]
213.821.3943
“Undeliverable: Postcards and Photos of Lives Interrupted" Opens at USC
Peer into lost worlds represented by vintage Armenian postcards in 3D dioramas,
juxtaposed with full-scale murals of contemporary images
THE USC INSTITUTE OF ARMENIAN STUDIES presents a one-of-a-kind installation of
extremely rare postcards from Anatolia, displayed alongside scenes from many of
the same locations captured a century later.
“Undeliverable: Postcards and Photos of Lives Interrupted," which runs August
28 through December 18 in USC’s Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, revolves
around 160 original printed sepia tones, some of which have never been
exhibited before, hand-picked from the world’s largest collection of Ottoman
postcards. Illustrating the everyday lives of Armenians in cities, towns and
villages, these pictorial souvenirs would be banal had their subjects not been
exterminated by near-total genocide.
Collected over 32 years by Istanbul-based businessman Orlando Carlo Calumeno,
the 80,000 unique postcards, all printed between 1895 and 1921, belong to a
larger collection of books, furnishings and printed ephemera documenting
quotidian life in multicultural, multilingual, turn-of-the century Anatolia.
“The postcards are especially interesting artifacts to work with,” says
exhibition co-curator Narineh Mirzaeian, a Los Angeles-based designer and
architect. “They’re pre-genocide, but they foreshadow what is about to happen.
Or they don’t foreshadow it, which feels even more stark.”
As a counterpoint to the vintage postcards, the installation features Brazilian
photographer Norair Chahinian’s visual explorations into his own Armenian
roots. Drawn from two books of his photography, Armenia (2008) and The Power of
Emptiness (2012), they include images captured using an antique camera owned by
Chahinian’s grandfather, an Anatolian refugee who operated a photo studio in
Aleppo, Syria, before joining the Armenian diaspora in São Paulo.
Photography and photographic printing, notes the collector, Calumeno, were
almost exclusively Armenian trades in Ottoman Turkey. Religious prohibitions
against making graven images prevented Muslims from entering the profession
until 1910, and it fell to Christians, particularly Armenians, to fill the
vacuum.
Postcards, he says, “were what the Internet is today”—an easy, low-cost way to
preserve a travel memory or to keep in touch with loved ones. “In those days,
people received hundreds of postcards from friends everywhere,” Calumeno says.
“Most were thrown away.”
Some postcards included in the “Undeliverable” installation depict world
heritage sites along the Silk Road. Others document ordinary village life and
mundane urban structures—a new factory wing, school building or orphanage.
Missionaries used these to support fund-raising efforts.
Calumeno, who is Armenian on his mother’s side and Levantine-Italian on his
father’s side, focuses his postcard collecting on Anatolia’s diverse minority
communities: Assyrians, Jews, Greeks, Kurds and especially Armenians. “The
greatness of Anatolia was that melting pot,” he says. “Now it has become a
mono-cultural, mono-lingual environment.”
His favorite card—the first he ever purchased, at age 16—depicts Istanbul’s
Hippodrome Square near Hagia Sophia, the cathedral-turned-mosque and a major
tourist attraction. Curiously, on the back side, the sender had jotted down a
home remedy for nursing mothers to prevent cracked nipples. The card is
addressed, in swirling Armenian cursive, to the woman’s sister in Bursa.
“These postcards are very important,” says Calumeno. “Each one is a gateway to
connect with the past—a glorious past where everybody called each other ‘my
brother, my sister.’ You see these naïve people, not knowing what is going to
happen in the future. In these images, they live happily forever.”
“Undeliverable” is presented on two floors, in multiple parts, spanning the
Doheny Library’s Treasure Room, Rotunda and Arts Corridor.
Working closely with USC Institute of Armenian Studies director Salpi
Ghazarian, 160 vintage postcards are displayed in vitrines on the ground level,
alongside documentary-style black-and-white images taken by Chahinian in recent
years.
But in the Treasure Room, the curator has taken an unconventional approach.
Focusing on 10 of the most intriguing postcards, she has scanned, enlarged and
optically separated the images, creating layered, three-dimensional dioramas.
Standing at eye-level on tripods, each diorama box invites visitors to peer
into a lost world through a time-bending tower viewer. On the surrounding walls
and ceiling, Mirzaeian has splashed full-scale murals of Chahinian’s bleak
architectural photography illustrating modern Anatolia’s abandoned spaces,
including a dilapidated Armenian church dome looming overhead.
The installation design invites visitors to navigate the curated scenes at two
scales, says Ghazarian—zooming in to study nuances of daily life brought to
life in the postcard dioramas, and zooming back out to see the blight left in
the wake of genocide.
“It’s this surreal emotional landscape where alienation meets nostalgia,
what-if encounters why, and despair yields to an irrepressible urge to
reconstruct and build upon the erased past,” she adds.
Genocide exhibitions typically focus on victims, notes Mirzaeian. This
installation focuses on places.
“It’s a different approach to what was lost, and what has remained,” she says.
“It goes beyond victimhood—all these feelings we slip into that are
unproductive. It’s more about re-inhabiting these spaces through the persistent
architectural details. Those imaginative realities are interesting because they
beg a lot of productive questions. Anytime you can do that, it’s good.”
“We’re very pleased to be able to present this immersive installation, in a
timeless, three-dimensional space, here in the Library. This is especially
important because the library’s long hours (open ‘til 10 pm weeknights, ‘til 8
pm Fridays and Sundays, and 5 pm Saturdays) will make it easy for anyone who
wants to spend time in this lost world to attend. Admission, of course, is
free,” said Ghazarian.
Related Events:
An opening reception on Thursday, September 21—coinciding with Armenia’s
Independence Day—will bring together curator Narineh Mirzaeian, postcard
collector Orlando Carlo Calumeno and São Paulo-based photographer Norair
Chahinian. The event is open to the public, and will include short remarks by
Ghazarian, Mirzaeian, Calumeno, Chahinian and USC Dean of Libraries Catherine
Quinlan.
On Saturday, September 23, the institute hosts its annual day-long Innovate
Armenia festival in Alumni Park. The “Undeliverable” installation ties into
that event with a panel discussion in Bovard Auditorium featuring Mirzaeian,
Calumeno and Chahinian, alongside historians. Moderated by Ghazarian, the
panelists will probe major themes in contemporary post-genocide scholarship as
it dovetails with artistic responses to atrocity.
About the Institute
Established in 2005, the USC Institute of Armenian Studies supports
multidisciplinary scholarship to re-define, explore and study the complex
issues that make up the contemporary Armenian experience—from post-genocide to
the developing Republic of Armenia to the evolving diaspora. The institute
encourages research, publications and public service, and promotes links among
the global academic and Armenian communities.
For Information:
USC Institute of Armenian Studies, 3518 Trousdale Parkway (VKC 351), Los
Angeles, CA 90089-0043, tel. (213) 821-3943, email: [email protected]
Doheny Library Hours:
Monday through Thursday, 8 am-10 pm; Friday, 8 am-8 pm; Saturday, 9 am-5 pm;
Sunday, 12 pm-8 pm.
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