If you stand at the corner of Artsakh Avenue and East Broadway in Glendale you’ll catch a glimpse of a surreptitiously installed public monument.
It shows a woman’s face veiled by lace — a still from Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 film, “The Color of Pomegranates” — along with the phrase “ARTSAKH ENDURES.” Emanating from the piece is a soulful mix of Armenian songs.
To see (and hear) this unusual art piece, you’ll need a cellphone since “Monument to the Autonomous Republic of Artsakh” is totally virtual — visible only via an augmented reality app and visible only at that specific geographic point. It’s a poignant work: a reminder of a bloody conflict thousands of miles away in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan (known as Artsakh by Armenians), one that has left thousands dead and centuries of Armenian cultural legacy imperiled.
The monument is a collaboration among a group of Los Angeles artists and scholars. It emerges from a design by Kamee Abrahamian, with contributions by Nelli Sargsyan and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian. Sargsyan supplied the work’s haunting soundtrack: a medley that draws from songs about mountains and wind, a nod to Artsakh’s rugged landscape. Artist Nancy Baker Cahill, who has long used augmented reality as an artistic platform, was also involved, making the monument available for viewing on her 4th Wall app.
For its first performance, on Oct. 11, the group staged a procession through downtown L.A. that began at the Broad museum and moved to City Hall, where participants chanted, “The Rifles Our Ancestors Didn’t Have” (the title of the work). The artists wore striking white caftans emblazoned with an image of a rifle, a design that evoked the female Armenian freedom fighters of the early 20th century.
“The concept was looking peaceful, looking strong, looking powerful,” Baghdassarian says.
The collective followed this with a similar procession along the banks of the Los Angeles River that ended with the group dropping rose petals into the water while images from Artsakh were projected onto a bridge nearby.
The action functioned as “a healing,” says Nelly Ackhen Sarkissian, an installation and performance artist who is also a co-founder of She Loves.
It also incorporated iconic sites of the Los Angeles landscape. Southern California, after all, is home to the largest population of Armenians outside the former republics of the former Soviet Union. It is also home to one of the first monuments to the Armenian genocide built outside of Armenia: the Armenian Genocide Martyrs Monument in Montebello, completed in 1965.
The L.A. River performance employed as backdrop the concrete architecture of the river, as well as the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance — a way of connecting the Armenian story to to the American story.
“The focus point is always to have a strong L.A. backdrop,” Sarkissian says. “It’s not just important to say that we’re Armenians from L.A., but that we are engaging with our fellow Angelenos and Angelenas.”
The group is currently at work on another performance that it plans to stage in Malibu, possibly in January if the COVID surge eases, at the site of a house claimed by one of the recent fires.
“It’s a universal thing,” Baghdassarian says. “Whether you lose it in a war or you lose your home in a fire or you lose your ancestral land.
“Where does home begin and where does home end?” she adds. “How is a person willing to burn his own home down if he cannot go down to his home ever again?”
Hrag Vartanian is an arts journalist of Armenian descent who is editor in chief of Hyperallergic, which has doggedly chronicled some of the cultural issues at stake in the region. He is also part of an informal group of international scholars and cultural workers trying to compile information on historic sites in the region in anticipation of any destruction.
Vartanian, who has spent time in Nagorno-Karabakh, says that Armenian history is embedded in the landscape there. “Those buildings tell our history in an intimate way. … The history is written on the walls. Families are buried there.”
He notes that Armenian artists making work in response to the region’s tragedies is nothing new.
In the poignant painting “The Artist and His Mother,” created between 1926 and 1942 and held by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., artist Arshile Gorky depicts himself as a young boy with his mother, who died of malnutrition after being displaced by the 1915 Armenian genocide, in which Ottoman Turkish forces systematically killed 1.5 million Armenians.
“It’s not the first time Armenians have been threatened,” Vartanian says. “They have been threatened by Mongols and different invaders.”
“This is how Armenian culture has evolved,” he adds. “We take these stories and we take these instances and we build something new.”
Cultural sites may be at risk in the Caucasus. New ones arise in L.A.